On Sept. 10, 2025, the nation’s eyes were directed towards a shocking news story: Charlie Kirk, a controversial conservative political activist, had been fatally shot at a Utah college campus rally. That same day, in the neighboring state of Colorado, a 16-year-old student at Evergreen High School was firing repeated rounds of bullets inside his school, injuring two students before fatally shooting himself. News outlets and social media platforms buzzed with updates on both events, detailing law enforcement responses and bystander accounts. Then, videos of Kirk’s assassination began to circulate. Over and over, people watched the graphic clips play, some containing multiple angles of the same scene. Lowell senior Asher Barolette, one of many people who had viewed the video, found it upsetting and felt disgusted afterwards. He also heard news of the school shooting, but with no video clips associated with this similarly violent event, was later unable to recall the name of the school or the state it occurred in.
With the accessibility of the internet, social media has become a hub for the circulation of information, particularly current events and news. One common subject of news stories that garner viral media attention is gun violence.
In particular, the United States has a long and prominent history of gun violence; CNN reported 341 mass shootings in 2025 alone as of Oct. 12, with many of these incidents reported online.
Social media has the capacity to accelerate the rate at which citizens are being exposed to violence, from standalone tragedies to mass shootings. As such tragedies continue to occur, the stream of headlines blaring these reports and messages has led to many individuals feeling largely indifferent, creating a sense of desensitization as only the most sensational events are remembered. According to Dr. Garen Wintemute, a professor at UC Davis who has researched gun violence and its prevention, gun violence is defined as an intentional act of violence with a firearm that includes but is not limited to homicide and assault, self-harm, suicide, attempted suicide, and political violence. “People commit violence when they feel like they have no sense of a future,” Wintemute said. “That can be a young man who is aware that he’s been deprived of an opportunity for a good education, a good job. It can be [someone] who sees his friends dying around him and feels isolated. It can be an old man who is facing a life without continued employment, who’s having a hard time making ends meet, who sees his friends dying around him, and is isolated.” Political violence lacks a standard definition, as different institutions and researchers describe it differently. However, general consensus states that political violence can range from harmful online rhetoric to physical threats and real acts of violence, all with the goal of achieving a certain political outcome. While only making up for a small percentage of total violent crime, media amplification and the visibility of figures involved in political violence can increase their social and political impact.
Within the last year, one of the most notable events of political violence has been the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Kirk was a prominent right-wing activist and media personality who encouraged young voters to get involved with political conservatism. According to an AP News article, his shooter disagreed with Kirk’s political views, and wrote on a note found underneath his computer keyboard that he had “the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk” and was “going to take it.” After discovering his assassination, many students were left with mixed feelings. Wyatt, a junior under a pseudonym, initially stated that he did not feel bad about what had happened to Kirk. “I know that sounds messed up to say because it’s a person who got shot,” Wyatt said. “[But] I just said, ‘that’s just another person who gets shot’. That happens every day, right?” However, he started to feel more empathy about the situation more once finding out that Kirk had children, imagining if Kirk had been his dad. “I couldn’t imagine being their age… and seeing him basically just get murdered,” Wyatt said. For senior Celeste Murcia, Kirk was not someone she liked personally or politically, but she felt that he didn’t deserve to be killed over exercising his right to express his political opinions. “I don’t like Charlie Kirk, but that’s just f—-ed up. People are allowed to disagree with you, but disagreement shouldn’t result in gun violence. If you’re so against gun violence, you should be against the death of Charlie Kirk, period,” Murcia said.
While Charlie Kirk’s assassination drew a lot of attention, media coverage of political violence incidents has varied over time. In 2011, then United States Representative Gabby Gifford and 18 others were shot and injured during a constituent meeting. The Media Cloud database found that between the date of the shooting and 20 days after the event, digital coverage of the event through online news sources composed approximately 0.8 percent of all digital media. According to Politico, the shooting appeared on the front page of 135 U.S. newspapers in the first three days with coverage declining by about 10 percent per day. In 2017, after the shooting at the Congressional Baseball Game that injured Republican House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, coverage increased to 2 percent total digital media in the 20 days following the event and appeared on the front page of 52 U.S. newspapers that day. Newspaper coverage continued for more than 20 days but declined at a 50 percent rate, more sharply than in the previous incident.
Both Gifford and Scalise survived each of their shootings. However, in June 2025, Minnesota Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot and killed, the story appeared on the front cover of just 13 U.S. newspapers and had largely vanished from coverage by the 20th day.
Although additional mentions appeared between 20 to 30 days after, front-page coverage averaged just 0.6 front-page articles per day and accounted for 0.05 percent of total digital media coverage. By contrast, the assassination of Kirk received 6 percent digital coverage over a 20-day window.
Part of the decrease in newspaper coverage and slight increase in social media coverage can be attributed to the change in news consumption, outlined in a study by the Pew Research Center, which found that the total circulation of U.S. Sunday newspapers has more than halved, going from 48 million in 2011 to 20 million in 2022. Both Murcia and Barolette received most of their news from social media and noted that they had only heard about Hortman the day of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. “I’m surprised there wasn’t more uproar about it,” Murcia said. Her understanding is that Kirk’s following had been much more massive than Hortman’s, and despite being a House Representative, had less influence and power on social media. “But I also think that’s messed up, and I never understood why no one was talking about it,” Murcia said.
Today, social media gives people easy and instant access to news, producing a generation that is constantly exposed to online information, though not all of it is accurate. Aside from Murcia and Barolette, an Oct. 2025 survey conducted by The Lowell found that of 103 respondents, 52 percent of students receive most of their news from social media.
Senior Kaela Liao credits social media for being a quick method to learn new information. “Social media as a whole is a great place to learn new information. I would say it’s a lot faster, and because it’s faster, some things might not be as credible compared to other sources, which takes more time and research,” Liao said. “I do get most of my information initially from social media, but I always double check and verify with reputable news outlets.” The role of social media in the circulation of information after Kirk’s death led to what Wintemute described as “unique” circumstances. “The videos of him bleeding to death were immediately accessible. People saw those videos, oftentimes without warning,” Wintemute said. Video clips containing sensitive imagery are usually filtered through a media platform’s restrictions on graphic content, but the videos of Kirk’s death were shared too quickly, and at too high a volume, to be filtered out – leading to a mass influx of posts that overshadowed other news stories like the Colorado school shooting. With inoperative filters, social media can also contain disinformation: intentionally misleading information that is distributed to large numbers of people. The danger of disinformation, Wintemute mentioned, is the difficulty in verifying the legitimacy of the information itself.
While not limited to disinformation, Wintemute stated that social media acts as an echo chamber for people of similar minds, and when it comes to disinformation influencing political opinions, can have an increase in risk for polarizing beliefs that push people to fuel violent behavior. Increase in violent behavior leads to higher coverage rates, creating a positive feedback loop where users become exposed to these incidents even more. Thus, Liao ensures that the news she receives is always verified from a credible source, and says that news from social media should be “take[n] with a grain of salt, just because it may or may not be accurate.”
Apart from political violence, gun violence, particularly school shootings, has been a highly discussed topic for many years. According to The Lowell‘s survey, 76 percent of respondents believed political violence had an adequate amount of coverage, but 56 percent of respondents believed there was not an adequate amount of coverage on gun violence overall. The K-12 School Shooting Database found that since 2023, there have been nearly 900 recorded incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in over 650 casualties. On the day Kirk was shot, a high school located in Colorado also experienced a school shooting. Many students recalled seeing much less coverage of the school shooting compared to Kirk’s assassination, and didn’t have the same level of reaction when they found out about it. Barolette remembers feeling underwhelmed when reading an article about another school shooting that took place just a couple weeks prior. “My main reaction was, wow, only X amount of people died, that’s pretty small, which I think is a pretty horrible reaction,” Barolette said. “The reality that we’re living in is that a school shooting where not that many people die is not considered a big deal and people are just waiting for the next big school shooting to happen for them to actually pay any attention to.” Murcia brought up how she feels that people have become desensitized by all the violence happening around them, particularly school shootings, with how often they occur. “It’s kind of not phasing people anymore. There’s not as big of an outrage as there used to be about it.”
According to The Lowell‘s survey of 103 respondents, 67 percent of students felt that repeatedly being exposed to violence in news has made them feel less sensitive about it over time. A study published on the National Institute of Medicine website in 2016 describes desensitization as a diminished response to certain external stimuli after repeated exposure. Dr. Edward Munnich, a cognitive psychologist at the University of San Francisco, also described desensitization as a psychological survival mechanism people adopt once they survive previous exposure that may have posed a threat. “If you survive [these events], if they don’t kill you, then you just tune them out,” Dr. Munnich said. He also warned that while it acts as a safety measure for the human mind, it can become maladaptive – leading to learned helplessness, a state in which one exhibits no control, despite having the means to. “We’re kind of just giving up and saying, well, thoughts and prayers, what can I do? There’s nothing I can do. And it’s really tragic that we’ve gotten to that point,” Dr. Munnich said.
Retrospectively, many students felt that their reactions to such events were also tied to how much they were personally affected by them. Wyatt believes that his greater familiarity with Kirk compared to students killed in school shootings contributed to his reaction. “This person was a household name. This is someone that we talked about a lot. The fact that he was just so hugely influential amongst the young people of America – that is what made it such an explosive event for people,” Wyatt said.
But ultimately, Wyatt feels that most people don’t know Kirk on a personal level, and therefore has this sentiment akin to how school shooting reactions have diminished: “I will spend much more time caring for my best friend who scraped his knee or broke his arm than caring about someone who I’ve never seen, never met, never known.”
For Lowell’s World History teacher, Lauretta Komlos, who has previously taught Psychology, the effect of seeing violent media constantly seems to be more of a tolerance build. “It’s a skill you learn. We taught you to tolerate it. We taught you to be ready for it,” Komlos said. “I do think that students are so used to gun violence – I mean, these are people that have been doing gun drills since they were little kids. It’s expected, like gun violence is not exceptional to them.” Komlos also compared a generational change in the way she saw Generation Z grow up versus Generation X, who passed proliferation laws on guns that allowed Gen Z to be exposed to such an extent. “I don’t blame Gen Z for being desensitized. They’ve grown up with it,” Komlos said.
Despite these perceptions, Wintemute shared that his research gives him hope that the future needs not to be as grim as it appears as the vast majority of Americans reject political violence altogether.
However, he emphasizes that as a society, we must all take part in order to make change. “We have two jobs to do. The first is to make that known; to be just as loud in opposition to political violence as some people are in supporting political violence. Number two, all of us have a responsibility to follow the old adage: If you see something, say something,” Wintemute explained. Komlos encourages students to take time away from their phones, do self-grounding exercises, and recharge by doing the things they enjoy. But ultimately, Komlos is sure that students would be able to do their best when encountering similar incidents of violence in the future. “I think one way is just unplugging for a week or two… give your mind a mental break,” Komlos said. “I’m not worried about your generation. I really am not. Yes, you might be desensitized, but I also think that your generation is very humanistic. Your generation is very realistic. I see responses to the shooting violences at the youth level and the young adult level. I think your responses are much more rational than the generations ahead of you.”
