I'm a Virginia Tech alumni. A roommate was wounded, and my academic advisor and several former professors of mine died. The killer had handguns.
When NBC chose to air the recorded manifesto that Cho recoded after he killed two students, but before he had gone to Norris Hall to kill entire classrooms, I knew they were ringing a dinner bell for more killers.
Gun availability hasn't changed. Media reporting has. However they shape the narrative by selecting who to interview. Many Parkland students blame the FBI and Broward County police for ignoring dozens of specific warnings regarding the killer. They aren't included in interviews, at all.
I resent the fact that the media repeatedly ignore the recommendations from the American Psychology Association and report the name and picture of the killers, fueling copy cat incidents, and conveniently ignore this in favor of guns.
When NBC gave the killer of my academic advisor his dying wish to get ratings, I knew that they don't care about victims. They just want ratings and the controversy that feeds them.
I don’t doubt your claim and I’m sure it happens to a degree, but I also believe that 18 year olds are capable of saying “yeah, we’re not happy that our friends are dead and no one is doing anything about it” while a camera is switched on.
Teenagers are quite capable of doing what you said and organizing their outrage when they really feel like it. That doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t also vast political and social machines working to aid, defeat, or co-opt the students’ cause. And I say this as someone who agrees with the students.
Those "corporate and public targets" do the exact same thing. This is just how politics works (sometimes wirh astroturfing, sometimes without).
>pressure can be exercised on large corporate and public targets.
Who use similar tactics but they do so with more money and resources than their diametrically opposed activist networks, and are typically way more reliant on astroturfing - e.g. when Comcast stuffed fake comments in the FCC comment box in its push to roll back net neutrality.
This takes time, and effort, and willing megaphones in media. The biggest illusion of the social media era is that any of this is "organic" rather than instigated top-down, using human networks built slowly over time rather than spontaneously willed into being using the magic of Twitter.
The media does not report, they shape the agenda, decide what is important and what isn't, and who gets to be heard under what sort of light.
Even this article pulls the same scam: it sneaks the question by you of whether the "kids" will succeed, thus painting them as the only real people with agency. You don't need to believe in conspiracy or crisis actors to see this is bunk.