If anyone is all-too-aware of the issue of gun violence in America, it is high school students. A group of 19 of them have set out to change society by changing its entertainment.
Over the last three years, the Project Unloaded Youth Council, comprised of kids and young adults ages 16-20, have tracked the number of guns seen on broadcast television (CBS, NBC, Fox, and ABC for this study). The group found 33 percent of all TV episodes studied in fall 2024 featured at least one firearm, itself a 33 percent increase from fall 2023. Our preferred platform for the first amendment is really using that second amendment liberally.
The council studied every hour of broadcast primetime television during the final week in September (Sept. 25-Oct. 1, 2022; Sept. 24-30, 2023; and Sept. 22-28, 2024) for each of the past three years. The council members logged the type of show, whether a gun was shown, whether it was fired, and in what context a gun was shown and fired.
Far and away this year, CBS led the pack and was found to be responsible for more than half — 55 percent — of broadcast TV episodes with guns shown, and 61 percent of episodes with a gun fired. This is really no surprise: CBS is chock-full of law-enforcement procedurals. In this study, a good-guy’s gun is still a gun.
This year, the majority of gun episodes depicted a gun being carried by a person involved in a crime — and a hell of a lot more guns were shown to be fired during criminal acts. That’s different compared to 2022, when the study found that it was mostly the TV cops carrying guns.
In all, 14 of 15 shows in 2024 that had a gun in them showed that gun being fired. However, overall instances of guns on screen in 2024 was a bit lower than 2022, the last “normal” year.
There’s good reason why the number ticked back up again compared to last year: September 2023 TV schedules were plagued by the writers and actors strikes, and broadcast television turned to unscripted programming to fill the void. Singing competitions and dating shows are relatively unlikely to feature firearms.
Studying just one week out of each year is of course an imperfect sample size. But Fall TV is generally in full swing by the final week in September, and the study has been consistent in terms of methodology and relatively consistent in terms of its findings. Omitting cable and streaming is also quite limiting, but these are high school kids — be cool.
Detroit IP TV is a local affiliate of the 