The Columbus Dispatch thinks the mass shooting trend is hard to explain. Well, first, there is no trend. That whole FBI study was fabricated to serve the Administration’s gun control agenda. Secondly, it’s pretty clear these things tend to cluster because the media likes to focus on the shooter, reprint their manifestos, and generally make them infamous. Other people with mental health issues see these stories, and desire such infamy for themselves. If you’re kind of a loser, or really not all there upstairs, this looks like a way to go out while being somebody, even if that somebody is a deranged mass murderer. I believe this is a big part of what drives other insane, depressed, or depraved people to carry out such attacks. If the media just stuck to the facts, and didn’t frame their stories in a way that makes the mass shooter notorious, I think you’d see far fewer mass-shootings. I know Bearing Arms does not print the names of mass shooters, and I’ve tried to do that in my blogging as well.
Media Coverage Drives Mass Shooters
I agree completely. The MSM makes these murderers into celebrities.
On the one hand, I’m on the fence as to whether or not we should refer to mass shooters by name: to me, it’s an important part of understanding what happened in a mass shooting event; on the other hand, since so many of these mass shooters are mentally ill, I sometimes wonder if releasing their names is a violation of the HIPPA medical privacy act.
On the other hand, when Rolling Stone puts a glamorous picture of one of the Boston Marathon bombers on their front cover, AND they justify it by saying he had such an impact on society…how is this NOT glorifying the actions of a mass murderer? It’s one thing to identify, matter-of-factly, who was involved in a shooting…but to actually glamorize the murderer is an entirely different kettle of fish!
It’s one thing to report that “Alex DeLarge walked into a gun-free zone today and clubbed sixteen people to death with a ceramic sculpture of the male genitalia.” It’s another, entirely, to glorify what he did and hold him forth as an example of how to execute change in society.
When I hear about these incidents, I immediately wonder as to the identity (not name, but affiliations and self-identity) of the murderer, and then about his motives for the crime. It helps to build a better ‘snapshot’ of the mass murdering mind, in general, so people can call for help for their friends or relatives when someone begins to exhibit warning signs of this kind of behavior.
Where we miss the mark, as a society, is when we DON’T call for help when we notice warnings signs, or when the authorities wash their hands of the matter and say, “We can’t do anything about him/her.” Certainly they can get the person the help they need – it’s not a criminal matter, no (not until they actually commit a crime), but it is a civil health issue, and there is recourse in all 50 states to get someone the help they need (or to determine if they even need help in the first place). And, of course, we miss the same mark badly when we glorify the acts of these people, whether by holding them up as an example to emulate, or by making them the standard bearers for political movements and agendas.