Tag Archives: School Gun Violence

Media’s focus on shooter’s family status harms adoptees and ignores national failures at gun control

The column below is an op ed I submitted to the Sun Sentinel media corporation of Florida on Feb. 15, 2018. I had requested that the column be printed to correct the company’s initial profile of Nikolas Cruz, the suspect who was arrested in the shooting death of 17 people in Parkland, Florida on Feb. 14, 2018. I did not hear back from the company’s editorial team. Because this issue is still timely and important, I am printing a full copy of my column below.

In my communication to the editorial team, I noted its Feb. 14 story (“Nikolas Cruz: Troubled suspect had been expelled from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School“) failed to cover the larger issue of the proliferation, sale, and use of weapons of war like the AR-15 semiautomatic rifles and how money influences gun legislation. I also wrote the coverage perpetuated harmful stereotypes against adoptees (like me). I have published a related article on my website on Feb. 16, 2018 (“Telling the wrong story of the alleged Florida shooter and why it matters“), written after I sent the Sun Sentinel my op ed proposal.

Media’s Focus on Shooter’s Family Status Harms Adoptees and Ignores National Failures at Gun Control
Guest Column for Sun Sentinel by Rudy Owens, MA, MPH

Like millions of Americans, I am outraged and numb how a lone gunman could lawfully acquire a weapon of war and murder students and teachers at a Parkland, Florida high school on Feb. 14. My heart goes out to every student, employee and family member impacted by another gun-related mass murder.

I also am troubled how the media avoided the larger issue of failed gun control and the suspect’s ease in acquiring a war weapon. Instead many media tried to find a root mental problem with the alleged 19-year-old killer, Nikolas Cruz.

Within hours after the rampage, the Sun Sentinel media company and national news media—Time, the New York Times, the Washington post—had identified an irrelevant fact in the first profile stories of Cruz. The shooter was reportedly a mentally unbalanced adoptee.

The Sun Sentinel article first posted the day of the killings (“Nikolas Cruz: Troubled suspect had been expelled from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School”) both beatified Cruz’s adoptive parents and singled out his adoptee status in the first sentence: “Adopted at birth by a loving older couple, Nikolas Cruz seemed to struggle in recent years.”

The article referenced his adoptive status no less than five times, yet failed to mention more important facts, such as why lethal weapons like the AR-15 rifle used in the rampage can be bought legally anywhere in the United States, including a stores like Cabela’s.

The pattern of associating adoptees with psychological pathologies is long-running among U.S. media. It is also continues historic bias that goes back centuries, stereotyping illegitimately born persons as demons seeds and vile people. Today most Americans still see adoptees through this persistent stigma, as illegitimately born people—it was the shame that lead to millions of infant relinquishments from the 1940s on.

Psychologists for decades have labeled adoptees as prone to mental illness with unscientific studies. Adoptees who searched for their past, and who were denied their records because of state laws that denied them their heritage and treated them unequally by law, were deemed mentally imbalanced. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders through the 1980s identified adoptees as having an imaginary problem it called “identity disorder.”

As an adoptee who has spent decades dealing with stereotypes and discrimination by state officials, the public, my own family, and media, I am not surprised how the media framed the suspect as an “adoptee” killer.

This stereotype is an easy story. It sidesteps harder ones, such as donations by the National Rifle Association (NRA) to mostly Republican members of Congress, and some Democrats. Politico reported last fall that in the 2016 election cycle, the NRA gave $5.9 million to GOP members and $106,000 to Democrats. A mentally unhealthy gunman is easier to grasp than the ways corporate money and access shape U.S. lawmaking, including the failure to renew the assault weapon ban in 2004.

In the weeks to come, likely more attention will be paid to the mental state of Cruz, and less given to the dealer who sold the reported killer his AR-15 or the lack of any meaningful national regulation that allowed for that purchase.

As an adoptee who speaks out on behalf of adoptees and their rights, I am sure I and other adoptees who talk openly of our status as adoptees will have to answer questions later from the public: Are adoptees potentially dangerous like Cruz?

Sadly, thanks to this initial coverage of Cruz, the public will likely will forget the killer’s name, the school’s name or the many victims’ names. I am less certain they will forget the alleged mass murderer was that unhappy adoptee, the one with a mental health disorder.

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Telling the wrong story of the alleged Florida shooter and why it matters

Within hours of one of country’s deadliest school mass shootings in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, multiple national and local media outlets published profiles of the suspect, Nikolas Cruz.

Rather than covering the absurdity that war weapons can be purchased by nearly anyone in every city of America in minutes in some locations, and the corrupting influence of groups like the National Rifle Association on politics, the media searched for clues to create a mental profile of the killer. (This is profoundly insulting to the victims of such crimes.)

The Washington Post was among many national media outlets that focussed on the suspect’s profile, including his adoptive status, shortly after the Parkland, Florida shootings.

A prominent fact in those first stories in the Sun Sentinel media company, Time, the Washington Post, and the NY Times was Cruz’s adoptive status.

The Sun Sentinel’s Feb. 14 story on the reported murderer (“Nikolas Cruz: Troubled suspect had been expelled from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School”) both beatified Cruz’s adoptive parents and singled out his adoptee status in the first sentence: “Adopted at birth by a loving older couple, Nikolas Cruz seemed to struggle in recent years.”

The story referenced his adoptive status no less than five times.

Missing: The Real Story of U.S. Gun Violence

The AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, and its variants, are the preferred murder weapon for U.S. mass shooters.

Missing from that story was the elephant-sized issue of the United States’ failure to control the proliferation, sale, and use of weapons of war like the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and how money and political access influence gun legislation at the state and national level.

Focusing on individual murderers, not the larger system, typifies how many U.S. media cover our nation’s outlier status as the gun-death leader among high-income countries. The rate of death by gunfire is 25 times higher in the United State than other high-income nations.

In the United State this year, we know that about 33,000 people will die from gun violence, and yet the United States has almost no gun restrictions found in countries like Japan, England, and Australia, despite the annual carnage.

So Why Should Adoptees Care Beyond Their Outrage over this Preventable Violence?

The suspect is shown in a photo released by Broward County.

The coverage of the shootings also perpetuated harmful stereotypes against adoptees (like me), who number 5 million or more.

I have submitted a guest column to the Sun Sentinel to challenge this type of distorted news coverage and to document how it will feed into historic stereotypes of people born illegitimately—a status we know that most Americans associate with adoptees.

If the Sun Sentinel does not reply by Saturday, Feb. 17, I will publish the column in its entirety on my book website. (My forthcoming memoir examines the larger issue of prejudice and discrimination in the U.S. adoption system against adoptees and birth parents.)

It is almost certain that this news coverage has already left its mark.

Long after the media move on to the next shooting tragedy, the public will likely forget the killer’s name, the school’s name, and the many victims’ names. I am less certain they will forget the alleged mass murderer was that unhappy adoptee, the one with a mental health disorder. And when key adoptee rights legislation makes its way through state legislatures–if it ever does–how many lawmakers and lobbyists will recall this incident and the bogeyman adoptee in their minds and wonder if they can really, ever, consider all U.S. adoptees as deserving equal rights by law.

That is why this matters.

[Author note: Having not heard back form the Sun Sentinel media corporation, I published my guest column addressing problems in the coverage of the shootings and the alleged shooter, which I reference above. You can find a full copy of the op ed I submitted to the company here. I never heard from the company’s editorial team; I sent the column to the company on Feb. 15, 2018, and decided to publish it on my website because of the timely nature of the ongoing story.]