Media to blame for school shootings?

Yeah, the WSJ columnist could be completely wrong and the media has done a much better job this time around. I don't know. I'll probably go back soon and start examining the coverage, but it's too soon right now for my taste.

The visceral connection is what makes for the horror part. But when you start listing the reasons why news is important (i.e., it gives us information that can improve our lives), this doesn't land for us. Do I have the occasional parental nightmares of a school shooter targetting my son? Absolutely. But I try to focus my worries and decision-making on the things most likely to actually kill him at a young age: neighborhood pools, the river, two-lane highways, my own driving choices.

 

It doesn't land viscerally for me because I'm necessarily frightened of it happening to me or my family. I'm a rationalist, like you. What the particulars of my life, however, do is sharpen my empathy for the people actually going through this. I keep telling myself - and I've heard this argument - that there are far more children dying at the hands of drunk drivers, probably in a single American day, than all the children killed by all the rampage shooters in the last 30 years. Maybe one feels like the cost of doing business and the other does not.

Or maybe there is something particularly gnawing about a massacre - people targeted by a madman, and realizing, in that brief moment, that this is occurring - that elevates it for me. You somewhat derisively say it's "horror porn." I'd like to think it's something slightly loftier. I am genuinely affected by the fact that, time after time now, this was someone's final moments. And it is particularly crushing when those people were 6- and 7-year-olds. And perhaps I'm also affected because I think the drumbeat of rampage killings say something about who we are as a nation. Even though, yes, I realize that violent crime overall is way, way down.

I know how this all must sound to someone who essentially is able to extract emotion from his response to most situations. I don't quite grasp the psychology myself. Not yet.

 

Any criticism in this case -- and not just from the original link although it is certainly a good example -- cannot be decoupled from the true goal of the critics, which is to ensure what they believe is their right to privately hold machines that were created solely because the military didn't feel that the current machines were killing people fast enough. They will say and do anything, without shame, to protect this right.

 

Studies about the correlation between news media and violence. Like I said, I've never seen one make that connection, and while I agree there's a consensus about the connection between violence and media, most of the time the term "media" in that regard isn't limited to news media. I'm not sure if you drilled down to that if there is as strong of a consensus if there is one at all.

 

Son, what I'm about to hand you is a legal document. It is not a concession of guilt, though you have the option to plead guilty to reduce your penalty for this infraction.

 

The primary connection is known as the Werther Effect and has been conclusively found with regards to suicide. Here's a good study on it:

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2095285?uid=3739744&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101510328471

Suicides rise significantly after media coverage of celebrity suicide (and not after non-celebrity suicide, which is important, because one of the main arguments is that the media needs to avoid making a celebrity out of the rampage killers.)

Here's a study that shows how self-imposed media guidelines to alter the coverage of specific types of suicides were effective in lowering them:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1009691903261

For tying it directly to school shootings, here's a great analysis:

http://jaapl.org/content/36/4/544.full

It essentially argues that these killings are a type of suicide (tying it to the effects mentioned above).

Here's a study it cites linking threats against schools with Columbine coverage:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11529800?dopt=Abstract

 

When I was 7 years old, I went to see "Rocky IV." My brother and I, upon returning home, immediately began play-acting the boxing scenes from the film. My parents had to intervene so we'd knock it off.

Without fully delving into RickStain's material, it's not inconceivable that, in a nation of 300 million-plus, someone with psychological problems decides he wants to become the next Jared Loughner or James Holmes or Adam Lanza, just like we wanted to be Rocky and Drago.

They have to get the idea from somewhere, right?

I do think it's a tough genie to keep in a 2012 bottle. And I'm not convinced that it's the celebrity of the shooter that matters so much as coverage, perhaps, of the event itself. And I'm not sure how you avoid that.

 

Adolph...Who?

 

i think the key point to your post is, you were 7.

another key point is: there's no where for people to go who are seriously fucked up. and all that started with prince reagan.

 

If the premise is that these types of shootings give the idea to other ill people to do the same thing, what does it matter whether the shooter is named or not?

The shootings since the 90s have been associated with towns -- Columbine, Aurora, Colo., Newtown -- not the shooters.

Much different than the 60s-80s when assassins names were among the most well-known names of the decades.

I am surprised the right-wing doesn't blame the devil. I guess painting the devil as the devil doesn't resonate with your fan base.

 

Hey, Irony Police. You look a lot like your brother, Coincidence Police.

 

Fuck that. Some people like to talk. Some people need to talk. Some people would like to do nothing more than talk.

Of course, there's a limit. There's human decency. But there's very little wrong with the initial approach, which some of those posters seem to take offense to. Like it or not, their town is Ground Zero now for a national debate.