Media to blame for school shootings?

Yeah, we had the argument about high school wrestlers, I think.

My only point is, you don't know who the ones who want to be left alone are until you initially approach them.

 

So?

So? I mean, I suppose that's a little bit late, but other than that ... so?

That would be pretty bad.

But I'm skeptical about its veracity.

 

Again, many people want to talk. Many don't.

How is a reporter supposed to know who's who until he or she asks?

 

The stuff with the residents goes very much more to RickStain's earlier point.

We need to know what happened. For a couple of days. We don't need a front-row seat at the funeral and an hourly accounting of just how much it hurts.

 

Neither Beck nor Limbaugh currently have a TV show.

Limbaugh, in particular, almost never does TV appearances. Once in a while he goes on Greta, because they're friendly, but that's about it.

But, nice try.

 

Yeah, this has struck me too. I keep hearing how we've turned them into celebrities and everyone remembers their names.

Really?

I know Jared Loughner's name because I had to cover that case endlessly. I remember James Holmes in Aurora because the local police PIO has the same name.

Other than that? If you give me 5 minutes, I'll come up with the last names of the Columbine kids. I don't remember the Virginia Tech guy's name. I don't even remember the name of the kid at Thurston HS in Springfield, Oregon, and I worked down the street from Thurston until a couple of years before the shooting, and had friends with kids who went there.

I won't remember Lanza's name in a couple of months.

 

Should the media have named the group that caused September 11th?

What about the guy that shot JFK?

This was some stupid internet hoax (Morgan Freeman) that certain people bit on.

Stay focused on legal guns killing children, not what the gun lobby and its puppets forward in emails and tag on facebook.

 

The name thing is kind of a red herring. It's a silly symbolic line in the sand that dances around the periphery of the real point.

I bet not one person in 10 who didn't have a connection to that area could come up with the names Klebold and Harris. But I bet the majority of Americans can bring to mind quickly the idea of the two angry teenage dorks who liked to wear trench coats and were bullied too far, driving them to take their revenge on their social tormenters. The perpetrators became the antiheros, the centers of the story, in the cultural memory (and the fact that it's almost all false is a whole other issue).

Some of the links I posted earlier did an interesting job of explaining that suicide methods are deeply cultural, and that these rampage shootings are essentially usually a form of suicide. The message is being broadcast loud and clear to these extremely unstable people is "If you are upset and want to go out in a blaze of glory, grab a gun and start shooting." That's why we have school shooters and not suicide bombers or mail bombers or whatever.

If you want to stop broadcasting that message, treat these shootings just like you would a bus crash where 28 people, mostly children, died. Horrible and sad, but the story's not about the bus.

 

There is a specific, well-studied pscyhological effect that says people in a certain age range (teenage, very early 20s) with mental illness are especially susceptible to copycat-ism in violent crimes. That's why it's being discussed here (well, by me. I'm not responsible for what gun nuts are saying or why they are saying it).

 

Same reason why mentally ill folks can get their hands on assault rifles with 30-round clips. These days, anyone can call themselves a "journalist." No license required.

 

Thanks. Reading through these. The Daily Beast had an interesting piece from a guy who by his own admission thought he was at one point just a couple of small steps from being a mass shooter-type. He pointed to media coverage in his own story as a motivation. Some interesting stuff here on kids motivated to violence by Columbine: http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=126447.0;wap2

That said, I don't know how you step back from the coverage. Do you not report the name? I don't think that would keep tech-savvy kids from finding it out and getting it all over the Internet. You can't ignore the shootings, and it seems for these disturbed people, any coverage at all is motivation. So how do you cover a mass shooting?

 

I blame The Gay.