Saturation coverage of spree killings yields more spree killings:
Though we seem to be plunging ever deeper into a dark night, researchers now have a far clearer view of a key factor in the violence. A long-standing theory has matured into a body of evidence that can no longer be dismissed: The level of attention paid to mass shootings is central to why they keep happening.
The idea that some crimes might be self-spreading, like a disease, was proposed as early as 1890, when the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde labeled murders copying Jack the Ripper “suggesto-imitative assaults.” For mass shootings, the effect was well known among researchers by the early 2000s, when a wealth of information allowed forensic psychiatrist Paul E. Mullen to conclude, “These massacres are acts of mimesis, and their perpetrators are imitators.”
After Columbine, researchers discovered that spree killers (as distinct from terrorists) were seeking immortality.
Who grants immortality in our society?
How many 35 year olds today, outside of entertainment and professional sports, are more famous than Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris?
Remember the Vegas massacre? Been 50 days, and what do we know about it?
I have commented on this before, we have a first amendment problem, not a second amendment one.
Do I believe in regulating the first amendment? No, no more than I believe in regulating the right to bear arms. But it would help to acknowledge that fixating on violence is toxic.
CNN and its ilk have no reason to lessen the coverage of spree killers.
The massive news coverage, playing the same six video clips over and over for days on end, is a win-win situation for them:
1. Increased ratings and more viewers who are titillated by the obsessive yet calorie-free reporting.
2. Possibly spurring on the next killer helps them move forward with their anti second amendment desires. See! We need to ban guns!
If 300 million people see the same news on CNN 24/7 but only one person is moved to action by it, do all of us have a media problem or does that one person have a mental health problem?
The media is complicit in defining deviancy downward, so that behavior unthinkable one generation ago is now celebrated, but news anchors would have no influence if not for Leftists in academia, the legislature and on the bench working tirelessly to reverse America from Ozzie and Harriet to Ozzie Ozborne.
When society insists the solution to an inconvenient baby is to kill it; the solution for too many minority students failing is to pass them; the solution to too many illegal aliens is to amnesty them; a person whose grasp on reality is already tenuous could be forgiven for thinking the solution for jocks who bully him and mean girls who snub him is to shoot them all and ride the crest of fame on CNN. But CNN isn’t the root cause of the mental disorder and shutting down the network isn’t treatment for the patient.
Ari Schulman has been beating this same drum for a while. Here’s his column from 2013:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-mass-killers-want8212and-how-to-stop-them-1383957068
My position since Newtown is that we start naming spree killers in the same way we do hurricanes: going alphabetically and making up names that start with that letter, e.g. Hurricane Carmen, Spree Killer Clyde. Never acknowledge the killer’s real name, simply assign him a random (and perhaps embarrassing) name.
simply assign him a random (and perhaps embarrassing) name
How about Unhinged DemoncRat #1 or Mooslim Jihadist #3 and so on and so forth. That should cover about 99% of the cases.