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Abstract
In this study, I conduct a case study of news media coverage of Dylann Roof's mass shooting in Charleston, SC in 2015. Using systemic functional linguistics, I explore how journalists construct a reading public's relationship to a mass shooter and his victims. In the journalists' profiles, I find interdiscursivity deployed to draw on past mass shooting discourse around Columbine. I also find this feature is used to frame the mass shooter as a loner/lone wolf, which I argue is a stigmatization of antisocial personality types which are three times more common in males than in females.