#NotOneMore
Combating Gun Violence with #NotOneMore
Introduction to the Task and Description of the Event
Group 5 of the Digital and Multimodal Writing course of the Fall 2021 semester chose to complete their blog on the activist hashtag #NotOneMore. In 2014, a shooter in Santa Barbara, California took the lives of six people near the University of California. The shooter was identified as 22-year-old Elliot Roger and prior to his rampage near the University of California, he stabbed three in his home. One of the victims of the rampage was 20-year-old Christopher Martinez who was a student at the university. The hashtag #NotOneMore was the result of a phrase that the father of Christopher Martinez, Richard Martinez, stated after his son was shot. Miles Kohrman of Fast Company reported that Richard Martinez said in ‘an emotional statement’, “Too many have died. We should say to ourselves: not one more” (Kohrman 1). While addressing Congress and the emotional crowd of thousands of students, parents, and family members during the memorial service honoring the six UCSB students killed in Isla Vista, Martinez tells the crowd that he does not speak for all of the victims parents, but rather he speaks out of desperation and dissatisfaction by the inaction of our lawmakers to create stricter gun control laws, and the endless mass killings happening across our country.
For the research of this assignment, students have collected data in the form of tweets from Twitter in order to explore what information or thoughts that Twitter users shared with the hashtag. Students found that some were informational and/or supportive, brought awareness to other shootings, included information about politics surrounding guns, or unrelated to any of these topics.
Data Collection
In order to collect adequate tweets relating to our topic, we used Advanced Twitter search to look for the top tweets within the time frame we were searching. We searched for tweets from May 23, 2014 to June 23, 2014, so we had tweets ranging in the first month of the incident. When conducting our search, we also searched for tweets that included any of the words such as “gun”, “violence”, “shooting”, “school”, “support”, “resources”, and “politics”. The top 50 tweets that were available with this search criteria are the tweets that we used for our research.
The following link was the search link which we used to acquire the data: https://twitter.com/search?lang=en&q=(gun%20OR%20violence%20OR%20shooting%20OR%20school%20OR%20support%20OR%20resources%20OR%20politics)%20(%23NotOneMore)%20until%3A2014-06-23%20since%3A2014-05-23&src=typed_query
Note: Clicking the image in the example box will take you to the link which the tweet is found.
Data Analysis
Going into this project, we expected to find a general outpouring of emotional support and kindness. The events being campaigned against in #NotOneMore are emotionally fraught and challenging to cope with. Therefore, we had assumed that the digital activism of #NotOneMore would be focused on standing in solidarity with victims and educating more people about the nature of gun violence in schools. If this had indeed been the case, however, we would have certainly seen more than 36% of our findings being dedicated to either emotional support or distributing information and resources, while a further 12% of tweets were devoted to connecting the movement to other shootings, expanding the reach of the hashtag. Instead of establishing any sort of firm solidarity, the vast bulk of tweets we combed through were quite political in nature, taking up a whole 44% of our sample. While gun violence in schools is certainly a political issue, the overwhelmingly dominant focus in the #NotOneMore movement following its inception on framing gun violence in a purely political light provides insight into how the movement failed to really be present for victims in any meaningful way. At the very least, however, the movement, particularly in its political tweets, made ample calls for change. These calls for change, however, simply lacked any active activism.
Instead, the abundance of political tweets, many from accounts with names such as “Republicans R Evil'' seem focused on de-claiming political opponents as morally bankrupt. For example, Twitter user #VoteBlue @EqualityWorld tweeted the following meme, describing Ronald Reagan’s support for a ban on assault weapons and Antonin Scalia’s ruling that such a ban would be constitutional:
This meme is captioned with the statement that gun owners have been “played for suckers".
While the ultimate intention of posts, such as this, might be to convince the “gun owners” of Twitter that they should support some sort of gun reform which could make schools safe from the ‘one more’ shooting #NotOneMore is striving to prevent, telling those same gun owners that they have been “played for suckers” is not likely to change their minds. Instead, such verbiage is only bound to contribute more to the toxic and competitive nature of discourse on the internet.
This focus on the purely political contrasts with other far more ‘successful’ digital activism. The #BostonHelp campaign, for instance, directed its efforts towards providing people in need with “Emotional support … Information and Resources … [and] Material Support,” while also dealing in some measure of “Boundary Work” (McIntyre 8-9), as described by McIntyre in “Networked Intervention & the Emergence of #BostonHelp.” While McIntyre’s methodology differs from ours, the difference between the results of a search through #BostonHelp and one through #NotOneMore is striking. #BostonHelp sought to actively provide support, both emotional and material (McIntyre 9), providing very concrete solutions to a problem. #NotOneMore on the other hand provided little more than a well-intentioned, though less-than-effective political soapbox.
Conclusion
The activism campaign of #NotOneMore, from its inception, struggled to make any active action for change. While individuals within the campaign certainly made attempts to provide emotional support for the bereaved, to inform the curious, and to bring awareness to other tragedies, the movement on the whole tended towards being bogged down in one-up-manship against political enemies and hypothetical ‘gotchas’ which failed to get the movement anywhere. While there was certainly initially well-intentions in regard of the movement, stemming from one father’s grief and desire for change, the competitive nature of Twitter as a medium quickly stalled any real action to bring about that change. #NotOneMore, then, is a monument to the challenges of integrating message and medium; Twitter as a medium simply lacks the sort of environment conducive to the sort of change #NotOneMore hoped to bring.
Works Cited
Andrea, [@KshrGirl]. “Found a Gun at His Friend's House. Died Yesterday. HTTP://T.CO/KKOGIDQD8N Pic.twitter.com/vzu8fim7h9 | #NOTONEMORE #NRA MT @KagroX @Winterthur.” Twitter, Twitter, 18 June 2014, https://twitter.com/KshrGirl/status/479309311605092352.
Candea, Ben, and Gillian Mohney. “Santa Barbara Killer Began by Stabbing 3 in His Home.” ABC News, ABC News Network, 24 May 2014, abcnews.go.com/US/santa-barbara-killer-began-stabbing-home/story?id=23853918.
Dave [Merlyn43]. “A Sandy Hook Father's Urgent Plea: America Must Do Something about Gun Violence Http://T.co/sZ9Hh8dH7R #Gunsense #Notonemore.” Twitter, Twitter, 15 June 2014, https://twitter.com/Merlyn43/status/478248694353895424.
Dexter, Hollye [@hollyedexter]. “.@ReallyMarcia Pretty Please Tweet Us a Pic like THIS. #MomsDemand #Notonemore Child Lost to Gun Violence. Xo Pic.twitter.com/O9VTXEWE2X.” Twitter, Twitter, 12 June 2014, https://twitter.com/hollyedexter/status/476898367591546882.
Kuschmider, Rebekah. “Not One More.” Stay At Home Pundit, Stay At Home Pundit, 28 May 2014, http://www.stayathomepundit.com/2014/05/one/.
McIntyre, Megan. “Network Intervention & The Emergence of #BostonHelp.” Hashtag Activism Interrogated and Embodied: Case Studies on Social Justice Movements, Edited by Melissa Ames and Kristi McDuffie, U Colorado/Utah State Press, 2021 forthcoming.
Kohrman, Miles. “A Grieving Father's Words Inspire #NotOneMore Movement.” Fast Company, Fast Company, 28 May 2014, www.fastcompany.com/3031154/a-grieving-fathers-words-inspire-notonemore-movement.
[@EqualityWorld]. “"@Kennettdems: Dear Gun Owners: You've Been Played for Suckers. Pic.twitter.com/kck5fe2h61 #Notonemore’ #Tcot #Guncontrol #UniteBlue #P2 #P2B.” Twitter, Twitter, 16 June 2014, https://twitter.com/EqualityWorld/status/478698819668815872.
[@GammaRae206]. “‘My Gun Is My Shepherd..." The Fetishists' Psalm. #Gunsense #Notonemore Pic.twitter.com/IE3F94bZbx.” Twitter, Twitter, 18 June 2014, https://twitter.com/GammaRae206/status/479134002985459713.
[@GunSenseUSA]. “Facts about Gun Violence Trends May Surprise You>>Http://T.co/GWliz1wRIA@Voxdotcom #MARCHINGMOMS #NOTONEMORE #NRA Pic.twitter.com/aqVb9lDVyi.” Twitter, Twitter, 14 June 2014, https://twitter.com/GunSenseUSA/status/477871061447741441.
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