Thoughts, Prayers, and Pageviews
What Wikipedia data reveals about how we react to school shootings, and how quick we are to forget
13 school shootings have already occurred in the United States this year, resulting in 10 people killed and 13 people injured. Most recently three children and three adults were murdered at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee on March 27th. Unfortunately, this year is not an anomaly in terms of gun violence in American schools. Since 2010, there have been over 1,200 incidents involving a gun at U.S. schools, and in 2020 firearms surpassed automobile accidents to become the #1 leading cause of death for American children aged 1–19. Each incident of gun violence in schools tends to spark large public reactions, from meaningless social media declarations of thoughts and prayers for the victims’ families, to Instagram stories of the victims’ names and faces and repeated insistence that our politicians pass some kind of gun control legislation to prevent the loss of more young lives. However, despite strong initial awareness and activism, the public memory of each event seems to fade quickly, replaced by other fixtures of the news cycle, or by a newer gun violence tragedy. To track what degree of awareness various shootings have gained, and how long each tragedy remains relevant, we can examine data about the Wikipedia pages of these shootings, and related topics that gain prominence each time one occurs, like Gun Control and the Second Amendment.
Looking at the Wikipedia data of the Covenant school shooting, it’s immediately evident that we are quick to forget these tragedies. Wikipedia’s diligent editors were able to get a page for the shooting active on the same day as the incident occurred, and on that day (March 27th) the page received 114,325 views. The pageviews peaked the following day at 529,446 but rapidly declined in the following days. It’s not even been two weeks since this tragedy (which so far has the most fatalities of any school shooting this year), but the daily pageviews have already dropped to just over 15,000 (on April 6th, 2023).
By comparing this to the less recent (but horribly unforgettable) 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, it becomes clear that in the span of 10 days, the pageviews for the Covenant shooting have nearly already leveled off to what will likely be the eventual baseline daily views. In the week preceding the Covenant shooting the Sandy Hook Wiki page averaged around 4,000 daily views, so this figure can serve as a proxy for the quantity of ongoing attention the Covenant page may gather. 10 days is all it takes for a school shooting to go from having the eyes of half a million on it, to averaging only about 3x the daily views of a shooting from over a decade ago.
Of course, Sandy persists in the public memory much more strongly than other school shootings; the 2022 Central Visual and Performing Arts High School shooting (2 deaths, 7 injuries) and the 2021 Oxford High School shooting (4 deaths, 7 injuries) fluctuate around 100 and 400 daily views respectively (spikes occur each time there is a new shooting). So perhaps we cannot expect that the Covenant shooting will retain a similar level of long-term attention as something as big as Sandy Hook, but this evidence does not discredit my point. The Covenant daily page views have already plummeted to below 3% of what its peak views were, and the low daily views of mid-sized shootings from recent years further demonstrate how quick we are to forget events that in other developed countries would define a generation.
The 1996 Port Arthur Massacre (35 deaths, 24 injuries) that occurred in Australia in 1996 still receives an average of 1,984 page views per day (from July 2015, the earliest date pageviews are available, to present). The massacre sparked huge changes to Australia’s gun control laws, and the Australian Institute of Criminology Reports that since 1996 (and going up to 2013 when the study was published) there have been zero mass shootings in Australia (compared to 46 in the U.S.). In the United States, each individual shooting gets lost in a sea of others. Nobody has the mental capacity to remain attentive to the dozens of school shootings occurring every year here, and the speed at which we forget is just a sad symptom of our condition as a country in which school shootings have become a familiar occurrence.
Looking into this issue, I had hoped that even as awareness of individual gun incidents at schools faded, at least interest in topics like gun control, the Second Amendment, universal background checks, and assault weapons bans would remain high, indicating continued public interest in preventing more shootings. I charted the pageviews of four Wikipedia pages since 2015 that I expected would gain significant traction following school shooting events (Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, Gun law in the United States, Universal background check, and Gun control). Then I added markers to indicate the dates of the 5 largest (most deaths and injuries) school shootings in the U.S. since 2015.
Sadly, the data reveals that although these types of related pages do see significantly more activity after a shooting, that interest is still mostly temporary. In the above graph, you can see that the Second Amendment Wiki page by far gets the most attention before and after shootings compared to the other topics I tracked. A second graph which excludes the 2nd Amendment page is provided to give a clearer look at interest in other topics.
The 2nd Amendment page receives a median 2,934 pageviews per day, and its views jumped up to around 60,000 shortly after the Stoneman Douglas shooting, nearly half of the shooting itself’s pageview peak of 107,958. However, in the weeks and months following each shooting, interest wanes, and in 2023 the 2nd Amendment page has received an average of 2,366 daily views, far below its global average of 4,505 daily views. Each incident creates an ephemeral moment of caring, but once enough time has passed since the most recent shooting, we forget, once again becoming complacent until the next tragedy. Interest in these topics doesn’t seem to have consistently increased over time, and still, our politicians have done almost nothing to stop the horrific pattern of ever new tragedies.
