ABSTRACT
Columbine High School. Virginia Tech. A movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. The Safeway grocery store in Tucson, Arizona. Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The Navy Yard in Washington, DC. What these places have in common, of course, is that each was the site of a mass shooting in which a young man (two, in the case of Columbine) killed between six and 32 people and injured multiple other individuals who were targeted essentially at random. The majority of the victims were either strangers to the shooters or, if they were acquainted, were shot because of their location, not because of anything they had done. The other commonality among these incidents is that, in every case, the shooters were discovered to have been avid fans of violent video games and, in the case of the Aurora movie theater shooting, of the Batman movie villain The Joker. And in every case, at least some of the media coverage of the shooting raised the issue of whether the shooters’ consumption of violence-filled media content might have contributed to their shooting rampage1 (Kain, 2013). The question of how exposure to media violence via television, movies and video games relates to viewers’ likelihood of engaging in real-world violence is among the most-studied topics in mass communication research. It is arguably one of the most important, given that that answer truly may life-or-death consequences.
