There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Recent mass shootings by persons seemingly afflicted with serious mental illness (SMI) have received extensive news media coverage and prompted national dialogue about the causes of, and policy responses to, mass shootings. News media framing of SMI as a cause of gun violence may influence public attitudes about persons with SMI and support for gun violence prevention proposals. We analyzed the content of a 25% random sample of news stories on SMI and gun violence published in 14 national and regional news sources from 1997 to 2012. Across the study period, most news coverage occurred in the wake of mass shootings, and "dangerous people" with SMI were more likely than "dangerous weapons" to be mentioned as a cause of gun violence.

Related collections

Author and article information

Journal

PubMed ID:: 24432874

DOI:: 10.2105/AJPH.2013.301557

ScienceOpen disciplines: Chemistry

Keywords: Bibliometrics,Firearms,Humans,Mass Casualty Incidents,Mass Media,Mental Disorders,Public Opinion,United States,Violence,psychology

Data availability:

ScienceOpen disciplines: Chemistry

Keywords: Bibliometrics, Firearms, Humans, Mass Casualty Incidents, Mass Media, Mental Disorders, Public Opinion, United States, Violence, psychology

Comments

Comment on this article

scite_

Smart Citations

Citing PublicationsSupportingMentioningContrasting

View Citations

See how this article has been cited at scite.ai

scite shows how a scientific paper has been cited by providing the context of the citation, a classification describing whether it supports, mentions, or contrasts the cited claim, and a label indicating in which section the citation was made.