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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.
Plus, an actual grownup — Dan Romer, a Ph.D. and the research director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of UPenn — reviewed the youth council’s findings.
“It’s great to see young people, like the team at Project Unloaded, do the research needed to catalog the amount of gun violence we all see on a regular basis on TV,” Romer told IndieWire. “They know that entertainment media are where so many of their peers learn about guns and how much damage gun violence does to youth.”
CHICAGO P.D. — “Water and Honey” Episode 12005 — Pictured: Toya Turner as Kiana Cook — (Photo by: Elizabeth Sisson/NBC)Elizabeth Sisson/NBCSo maybe knock it off, TV creators? That’s the council’s message here. And much like in real life, there could be a reward for turning in your guns.
Shows without guns won 96 percent of their time slots among adults 18-49 in each of the past two years, the council found. (In 2022, the number was 81 percent; the council uses Nielsen’s Live + Same Day data.) In fact, the only show with a gun to win its time slot in 2024 was a 10 p.m. episode of “High Potential” on ABC.
The Project Unloaded Youth Council says it uses the 18-49 demographic because it is still the primary target for advertisers. Had they instead focused on overall viewers, a lot of CBS dramas (with a lot of guns) would have drastically changed those winning percentages. CBS averages the oldest audience on TV — the council members’ grandparents, basically.
“As high school seniors, we’ve grown up aware and worried about gun violence — we watch TV for escape,” Shiven Patel and Esha Ambre, two Project Unloaded Youth Council members who lead this research project, told IndieWire. “This report highlights a disconnect between what creators are producing and what audiences actually want. Americans see enough gun violence in real life. Many of us are tired of seeing it in our entertainment, too.”
But if you’re gonna show it, talk about it, the group suggests. Just once over the three years were the dangers of carrying a gun discussed on screen — in a 2022 episode of NBC’s “La Brea,” in which a character tells their friend (carrying a gun) that carrying a gun was a bad idea. It was a sincere, serious, and important message — especially for a show that featured dinosaurs.
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