So there I am, enjoying my morning Coke and a smoke, and I look down at the paper to find – whoa, shocker – another young teenage kid brought his gun to school in Richmond, Va. Of course, kids have been bringing guns to school for a while, but recently they’ve started using them.

Teachers, classmates, prayer groups – you name a class of people, and some kid has gone and ruined not just their lives but the lives of many others, all to make some inane statement. And it’s all brought into your home care of the media.

Those two kids in Arkansas who didn’t know the difference between hunting deer and hunting people? Oh, that was all because a girl had dumped one of the boys, right? Not because those kids were otherwise disturbed way beyond help. Or everyone’s hero, Kip Kinkel, Mr. Mafia-Hit-Man-in-Training. Running through the cafeteria before school, he fired away with a rifle until some heroic injured wrestler tackled him.

Both of these stories, and the one from last year about the student who went and shot up a meeting of a school prayer group, all got the saturation coverage such a story deserved. But where is it right to draw the line on such coverage?

Weeks of comparison between the different cases. Story after story seeking to find what made each person do it and why the trend has become so widespread. Now, I’m no sociologist or pysch major, so the former is beyond me, but the latter – that’s something else entirely.

Whether you’re a journalism major or not, you need to take note of how the media works. Everybody is subject to its machinations every day, and as you begin to see patterns emerge, it’s really quite depressing. The media covers the story, and the next day, everywhere you look is a tale of more in-school violence. As if the violence of recent years is a shocker, and this was the first time guns had been made accessible to anyone paying attention.

But the media has had a field day with this topic, beating it until the horse is broken, bleeding and too sore too beg for mercy. I can just see some kid sitting at home reading the front page and thinking, "Hey, my teacher really pissed me off today – here’s one way to get her back."

The feeding frenzies of the media are not breaking news, but their fumbling of this very delicate topic has yet to be seriously addressed. Unfortunately, we’re all in a bit of a catch-22 situation. If the incidents were not covered at all, it would be irresponsible reporting – but to cover each new incident as a nationwide news event just feeds the fire. And where were all these stories back when it was inner-city schools having these sorts of dilemmas? Localized in a paper near where the incident occurred, and/or buried in the major media outlets.

As the entire industry thrusts greedily onward looking for a new way to make a dollar from its audience, the burden for defining responsible reporting has fallen on the audience itself. Before we laud the media for its coverage of anything, we must first step back and make sure that we got our information from The New York Times, not the National Enquirer; CNN or one of its counterparts, not Hard Copy. Tabloids may sell, but in buying into the craze, the national media have sold us and themselves short.

– Jonathan Reed is a sophomore in journalism.