In the wake of last month’s Madison mass shooting, there are lessons to be learned from Nashville

In December 2024, a mass school shooting rocked the community of Madison, Wisconsin. Grace Johnson writes that the now-familiar mass-shooting media cycle has since been disrupted by the identification of the suspect as a 15-year-old girl. Reflecting on this and the 2023 Nashville mass shooting, she argues that to better understand mass shooting events, researchers must examine how perpetrators’ gender identity impacts media coverage, continue to explore how to handle materials left by mass shooters, and analyse the impact of disinformation on how mass shootings are discussed more widely.