Abstract
One common element surrounding mass shootings undertaken by people suffering from mental illness have been widely featured in the news media. The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect that these types of reports have on support for gun control policies in the general public. Given the widespread influence that the mass media has on a wide variety of public policy topics, there is adequate reason to formulate this hypothesis. The researchers will perform a survey after reading a news story about a mass shooting carried out by a person who suffers from a serious mental illness. The survey will include attitudinal questions involving support for gun restrictions for people with serious mental illness as well as for the general population. Many policy planners view the days and weeks after a mass shooting as a time to influence the development of guidelines and regulations.
Introduction
The purpose of this study is to determine whether coverage in the media influences the attitudes that people have toward gun restrictions. Obviously, any mass shooting is a tragedy, but the response to these events can be wide ranging. Some will favor restrictions on gun ownership, while others will insist that people who do not have mental problems can own a gun responsibly while the restrictions should focus on those who have mental problems. Still others will suggest that the shift in priorities should instead be on mental health policy, with emphasis on improving services to the mentally ill rather than denying access to firearms to those who do not have those difficulties. This study analyzes the effects of these messages in the media on both forms of restrictions.
Literature Review
It is true that gun restrictions on the general population have faced significant limitations from Supreme Court rulings in the recent past (Vernick, Rutkow, Webser & Teret 2011). This is why gun control policies have had to target discrete groups people or weapons who have been identified as dangerous (Gostin & Record 2011). Several shootings that happened fairly close chronologically to one another (Tucson, Virginia Tech and Aurora) led to the suggestion of two distinct types of proposals for gun control policies: laws to keep those with serious mental illness from owning firearms (Fix Gun Checks Act of 2011) and laws to keep people from purchasing magazines with large capacity (Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Device Act of 2011). While attempts to restrict large magazines have not worked, there have been more successes with getting laws passed to keep guns away from people with serious mental illness. There was already a federal law on the books keeping people who have gone through involuntary commitment or a mental incompetence adjudication from owning guns, and the law that was passed in 2008 funded the states to report any such persons to the background check automated system that licensed gun dealers use to vet those who want to buy guns (Simpson 2007).
The survey-embedded experiment will take place using the Survey Monkey website. Respondents will read a news article (no more than two or three paragraphs) about a mass shooting that was carried out by a person suffering from serious mental illness. Then they will answer questions about their attitudes about gun restrictions for persons suffering from serious mental illness as well as about the general population. A control group will answer the same questions without reading the article. Respondents will be assigned randomly either to the control group or the experimental group.
The central research questions are:
Q1: Do media messages influence the attitudes of their audience toward gun control?
Q2: Is there a significant difference between the changes in attitude toward gun control when it only affects those with a serious mental illness and when it affects the general population?
The researchers will secure permission from the administration of INSERT YOUR UNIVERSITY to send emails to the entire campus population to recruit participants in the survey. Those who respond in the affirmative will be assigned to one of the two groups at random. All respondents will receive the link to surveys through Survey Monkey. There will be two separate surveys, although both will have the identical questions. The purpose of maintaining two different surveys is to keep the answers from the experimental group separate from those of the control group. The control group will receive one survey but no news article, while the experimental group will receive the article and the other survey.
In this quantitative research study, the independent variable in the research is the news story. The story will cover a mass shooting that took place in the United States and was covered in a United States newspaper. The story will describe a mass shooting that was committed by a person with serious mental illness in the first paragraph. The second paragraph will talk about a proposal for gun restrictions that would potentially influence people suffering from serious mental illness. Any respondents who, according to Survey Monkey, who complete the survey in less than one minute are who take longer than 30 minutes will be ruled out of the statistical analysis. The rationale behind this is that those who take less than a minute went too quickly to digest the questions adequately, and those who took too long may have had computer issues that kept them from being able to complete the survey, or there may have been computer issues that kept the system from being able to record the answers accurately.
There are two types of questions on the survey: those that address gun control policy restrictions for persons suffering from serious mental illness and those who are simply part of the general population. These policy questions have been adapted from two different public opinion surveys (ABC News/Washington Post Poll, January 13-16, 2011 and CBS News/New York Times Poll, January 15-19, 2011). While previous surveys have collapsed the Likert five-point scales in order to develop dichotomous attitudinal indicators, the present researchers retained the five-point scale in order to detect degrees to the attitudes.
After conducting the surveys, the researcher will pull the Likert score numbers from the Survey Monkey results. Then, the researcher will perform logistic regression on the results from the control and experimental groups to determine whether or not the news media account had a significant effect on the tested attitudes toward gun control. The researchers had the Survey Monkey instrument randomize the question order for all respondents. The purpose of this was to eliminate the possibility of the ordering of the questions influencing the respondent attitudes. Ordering the questions at random keeps that cumulative effect from building up through the answering process.
The researcher will present the entire article in the paper, as well as a table of the various Likert score averages from the two groups. After running logistic regression, the researcher then will move to a discussion of whether the article had a statistically significant impact on attitudes toward gun control in both of those scenarios.
The worldview at work in this study is pragmatic in nature. There is already a lot of poorly written dreck on both sides of this issue here, whether it’s the gun lobby spouting forth about a Second Amendment that was written long before large magazines or automatic weapons, but instead when it took almost a minute to load a single shot into a weapon; or whether it is the gun control side saying that all weapons should be locked up and kept far away from people. There is a middle ground that is more pragmatic than both of these positions, and one of the elements of this research proposal is to determine how media messages push attitudes around in that spectrum.
Ethical Considerations
The purpose of this study is to determine whether or not media messages influence the attitudes that people have about gun control laws, both for the general population and for those who suffer from serious mental illnesses. It is important to remember that the United States Constitution’s Second Amendment has been largely cited as the rationale behind the Supreme Court’s rejections of prior attempts to limit gun possession by members of the general population. However, there is nothing unethical about researching potential limits on those who suffer from severe mental illness. The researchers do not have as their goal an alteration of the Constitution but instead a consideration of the ways that the media influences perception. As events in the 2016 presidential primaries have shown, the media can be quite influential in shaping the perceptions that people have about a wide variety of policy positions.
References
Fix Gun Checks Act of 2011, S436, 112th Congress, 1st Session, 2011.
Gostin, L.O. & Record, K.L. (2011). Dangerous people or dangerous weapons:
Access to firearms for persons with mental illness. Journal of the American Medical Association 305: 2108-2109.
Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Device Act of 2011, HR 308, 112th
Congress, 1st Session, 2011.
Simpson, J.R. (2007). Bad risk? An overview of laws prohibiting possession of
firearms by individuals with a history of treatment for mental illness. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry Law 35: 330-338.
Verrick, J.S., Rutkow, L.R., Webster, D.W., & Teret, S.P. (2011). Changing the
constitutional landscape for firearms: The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Second Amendment decisions. American Journal of Public Health 101: 2012-2026.
