Narratives are pretty much never strictly true. They are story lines that serve various purposes and thereby are in service of various masters and their biases/interests.
Like all fictions the narratives depend upon the capacity of the audience to believe them, even to the extent that will take some suspension of disbelief. So we get narratives shaped by those with interest in telling story components to audiences which are willing to engage what is being told.
Within the news genre of disaster narratives the basic framework is to name the disaster and the risks, relay the status of the immediate risks (event over vs ongoing, risk ended vs continuing, who is at risk--and descriptors of their innocence/goodness, what or who caused the disaster and/or presents the risk, what is the extent of the damage), suggest that there has been a response to the risk and that response is in capable capable hands.
The predictability of the narratives themselves become a form of comforting stability in the aftermath of crisis and chaos. Even a cursory review of the Pulse attack shows these basic elements in play.
As the narratives mature, the story line becomes rather more analytical and editorial and is more subjected to the perspectives of the zietgeist of the community, the interests/specialties of the tellers and more targeted at particular groups of audience. Consequently the follow-on story lines become more and more about the particular interests/fears of the audience as well as calls for action against whatever continuing risks/threats are perceived and acceptable to story teller and audience.
This moves the narratives away from news genre and into the realm of political opinion and thereby the us vs them divisions of the audience. With respect to guns there are in-stock story lines and lists of go-to-experts available to make production of story lines cheap and easy.
Secondary/sequalae story lines that develop around mass-shootings usually engage discussions of patterns associated with the risk. Things which supply an understandable order to the seeming randomness of the event. The audience wants order or at least predictabilty so that they can apply personal risk management. The maturing story lines take on a greater feeling of advocacy in various and frequently competing ways: bad/sick people are the problem, good guys are the solution, guns are the problem vs guns are the solution, freedom from risk is the enemy of liberty, etc. Analysis of these stories often reveal hypocrisy in the underlying advocates... as viewed from the left a favorite one is the people who strongly stand for second Amendment rights are frequently anti-government as establised by the Constitution.
Because the individual events are similar to previous events, although perhaps terribly worse, the primary and secondary narratives of previous events and previous responses of advocacy groups are immediately available for re-use.
The emerging meta-analysis takes on very familiar pattern whose collective dissonance produces obfuscation, frustration and squelches shared interest.
When interest drops, the narratives drop from the media and into the realm of special interest media where the narrative components remain in active memory until, yes, the next time.
= new reply since forum marked as read
