Guns are visible everywhere, fetishized in videos and film, employed in dozens of popular television shows. Their manufacturers are household names, employing thousands of Americans, men and women of all ages and races, urban, rural, and suburban. It’s an industry mired in lawsuits while excise taxes on its products brought in a staggering $162,148,000 to government coffers. It’s also an industry marked by legendary secrecy and private ownership — and one with misused products that cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $2.3 billion to $21 billion a year.
Yet I bet there aren’t a dozen reporters in the country for whom this is, or ever will be, their beat.
Guns, whether used recreationally, socially, competitively, professionally — or criminally — affect every corner of the nation. More than 200 million guns are in private hands. Forty-five percent of American homes now contain a firearm, a market penetration approaching that of cellphones, (58.1 percent, according to the Yankee Group), products that routinely enjoy media attention.
There are 350 subscribers to the Criminal Justice Journalists’ cops and courts reporters seven-year-old listserv, many of whom have written on criminal gun use and its judicial aftermath. But not all gun-related stories, despite popular imagination, are merely crime, courts, or cop stories.
Having spent the past few years researching and writing a book on the world of gun use and ownership, legal and illegal, traveling the country to interview more than 100 men, women, and teens of all racial and economic strata, I keep waiting to read the many untold stories I know are out there about guns and gun use.
“I hate guns.” I’ve heard these words, and variations of it, from senior journalists, male and female, too many times.The New York Times public editor, Daniel Okrent, recently wrote in his column that gun owners are among the groups “The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide.”
Received wisdom for many journalists means guns are out, gun control is in. End of story.
Such uncritical thinking is hardly unique.
There’s a persistent myopia when it comes to covering firearms — beyond predictable news stories and editorials on gun control — that bears closer consideration. In regions where gun ownership is popular, you’ll more likely read positive stories about those who legally use and enjoy guns. I live near New York City, where trying to pitch a feature story on firearms usually elicits a snort of derision.
“I hate guns.” I’ve heard these words, and variations of it, from senior journalists, male and female, too many times. These are the people whose snap judgements and preconceptions, often untainted by a dispassionate examination of the facts, determine coverage. Hardly a sophisticated consideration of a compelling national story.
Personally I find rape, incest, and beheadings in Iraq pretty distasteful, but there’s no shortage of coverage of these topics.
Many magazine editors duck gun stories for fear of losing readers or, more crucially, advertisers. Even when they do run something, getting it right seems difficult; one major national weekly ran a piece that included a glaring technical error in the lead, a mistake as basic and derisory to a gunowner as confusing an SUV with a motorcycle.
I don’t own a gun. And I’m well aware of the toll — 29,573 in 2001 — of gun deaths. Yet, more Americans die every year from hospital-based infections or complications, motor-vehicle accidents and falls.
Coverage of these issues doesn’t ride an editorial pendulum that swings wildly — as it often does with coverage of firearms — between persistently ignoring the complexity of the issues, or reflexively demonizing, hospitals, doctors, cars, and staircases.
Behaviors matter as much as statistics. How, when, why, and where Americans acquire their firearms, and how they use them, legally and illegally, is a matter worth serious, ongoing study — by journalists, not simply by a few academics and policy groups.
My research has been funded exclusively by smart, curious, and, yes, brave, editors, from the Globe and Mail, Wall Street Journal, Penthouse and, finally, from Pocket Books, which published my book on this subject, “Blown Away: American Women and Guns”, this April.
Take the gun quiz (at right). I’ve been asking some of these questions of the journalists I know — savvy, mid-career folks working for major magazines and newspapers. Very few can answer them correctly. Most disturbing to me, though, is a widespread, unexamined, and unapologetic prejudice against covering the subject knowledgeably and objectively, and/or many misperceptions.
Few editors would send a reporter to cover courts who had no idea what habeas corpus or voir dire mean. Nor would they feel confident in a medical writer who confused Viagra with Vioxx. Yet a persistent illiteracy on firearms is acceptable, even encouraged. Exhibiting intense curiosity about them, and their role in our daily lives, taints you as a gun nut, not someone fascinated by a compelling national story.
Many journalists I’ve met assume — falsely and annoyingly — that I must be a gunowner because I’ve spent so much time covering the topic. We all cover many issues in depth without becoming a part of the culture we cover, whether pro sports or Wall Street, child abuse or arts reviewing.
No question, covering firearms isn’t easy or quick, which may inhibit many journalists from even trying. It sure won’t bring in a lot of new ad revenue from the gun industry. Guns used in crimes end up in briefs or short news stories, the sort of thing a cops reporter or GA usually handles. Guns used for sport might end up in an outdoors column, if your paper has one.
But who covers the business of firearms and how and where it’s evolving? The only detailed story I saw recently about a new “smart” gun in development, one designed to be fired only by its owner, ran in a national weekly devoted to higher education. It’s a story with the usual elements: conflict, controversy, potential profit and loss, the sort of issues that are usually catnip to ambitious reporters.
How about the recent revelation from the Department of Justice that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives inspects only 4.5 percent of the nation’s federally-licensed gun dealers each year — far below the agency’s own goals? I’d been hearing that from my sources for months, waiting for someone, anyone, to start digging into what seemed like a juicy investigative story.
Who is working on longer, thoughtful analyses of the larger issues?
- Gun violence as a measure of public health
- The closing of hospital trauma units nationwide thanks to the cost of gun violence
- The success of a new national injury-reporting system designed to gather better statistics on gun violence
There are many thoughtful stories yet to be written.
Remember the old joke about the blind men asked to describe an elephant? Each said something radically different, depending what part of the animal they were touching. Coverage of guns is like that because it hits so many issues: crime, violence, law, jurisprudence, legislation, lobbying, manufacturing, distribution, regulation, sales and marketing. It includes issues related to medicine, public health, sociology, psychology and recreation — just to name a few — so it easily slips between the cracks.
It’s everybody’s beat, and no one’s. It needs to be someone’s.
Caitlin Kelly, a fulltime freelance writer since 1996, has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Glamour, Penthouse, New York, and many other publications in Canada, the U.S., and Europe. Her new book, “Blown Away: American Women and Guns” (Pocket Books, 2004) is the first national, neutral examination of the many ways that women and guns intersect in American life, past and present.
A former reporter at The Globe and Mail and the Montreal Gazette, in 1998 she won a Canadian National Magazine Award for humor. She has been a Poynter Institute fellow, a fellow with Journalists in Europe and a three-time fellow at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism. She has taught writing at New York University, Pace University, Concordia University, Marymount College, and the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center.
Her journalism can be seen at CaitlinKelly.com, and book reviews and sample chapters are available at BlownAwaythebook.com.
