How the Media Covers Gun Violence, and Where Their Priorities Lie

On September 10th, 2025, Charlie Kirk, cofounder of the organization Turning Point USA, was shot and killed. That very same day, 20 rounds were fired in an attack at a high school in Colorado. The response to these two events by news outlets across the U.S. revealed an underlying but not unseen issue in this country.

One, when reading this article, may wonder why a single man gets more of an introduction than a building full of hundreds of kids: title, background, and a full name. Such a question is completely valid—and entirely reasonable at that—and was actually the question many people on the political spectrum had.

If you were to look up anything related to gun violence on that terrible week of September 10th—excluding cookies and personalized recommendations—the very first thing you’d likely see is some mention of Kirk. Maybe paired alongside the school shooting, but almost always mentioned first. Why is that?

The term “media,” initially used to refer to news outlets in particular and expanded to include  social media, will be used in this article in its former meaning. Its purpose, beneath the outward declaration of bringing truth to the people and disseminating updates on global happenings, has always included sharing opinions. Whether underlying or not, reporters are constantly picking at potential stories with three aims: the story is relevant, it’ll matter to people, and it deserves to be told. All three aims, the last one most so, are entirely ambiguous and thus up to the reporter or the news outlet they work for to decide which story fulfills those aims. Consequently, many stories are swept under the rug or go completely untouched by broadcasters or journalists.

While many front-page stories are more easily decided on, a topic like gun violence remains controversial. It isn’t something that can or should be chosen for its star-potential alone; reporters deal with real human lives, things that can’t be easily discerned as more valuable than another. Sure, a person might claim a political figure such as Charlie Kirk being killed in an attempt of some sort of message is more important and relevant to the nation as a whole, but a single child killed alongside many others in a school shooting like the one in Colorado was still someone’s kid, still a member of the nation, still had their future taken from them, and was part of a much larger issue. Even if we put this aside, the child was still a living being—as much as any other—which poses the question of where to draw the line between caring about what people want or caring about telling the story as a whole.

As uncomfortable a topic as it is, gun violence remains one of the topics most urgently needed to be spoken about equitably. Especially now, with the state of society. We’ve begun to let our emotions steer us away from the real problem at hand—that is, the killing and the victim—and toward others, including who the shooter was, what their intentions were. All of these questions were asked not with the intention of gaining information, but rather the intention of controversy.

The media is a political tool. It always has been and always will be. Despite whichever leaning a major outlet has, how close they are to the center, the things they choose to release are all done in an aim to push a narrative, funnel the anger of the people in a certain direction, and influence the way we think. Shootings that are seen as the “most urgent” to be reported or most relevant to the present, ones that have the “greatest impact,” are prioritized over giving an unbiased, accurate and widespread portrayal of the gun violence we face in America. Violence should not be sensationalized, but it is sensationalized nonetheless. It’s how the country works. Patriotism, debate, slander—gun violence is treated as intrinsic to each. Because of that, we start to see deaths less as losses of human life and more as statements. A famous person gets shot and it’s political, school shootings are just “the way of things,” and gun deaths are “necessary sacrifices” for some bigger cause. It’s desensitization happening right beneath our noses. People don’t care about the people themselves who are dying because every time, death is tied to some sort of political commentary. Those who do care are shrunken to a minority: heard, but never listened to.

While impossible to eliminate this bias factor, we cannot keep pretending the higher-ups are the only ones that matter in this situation—nor can we keep placing unwavering faith in their decisions—because the country is built on its people, and the people deserve to be heard.  They each deserve to have their story told, in company with every other person killed as a result of poor judgment and outdated laws yet to be reworked. Each life lost, especially at the hands of others’ decisions, is more than a number, and it shouldn’t be handled as such. Gun violence is more than words on  paper, more than spoken statistics. It is the reality of America, and even still, it is novelized. If there’s a time for a change, that time is now.