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.]