“Seems like the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight”–Chris Harper-Mercer, identified as the Oregon shooter (New York Post, 10/2/15)
Investigators are reportedly looking into whether the apparent killer in the latest mass shooting announced his murderous intentions beforehand on the social media site 4chan. Because of 4chan‘s anonymity, it’s impossible to say whether the poster who warned “don’t go to school tomorrow if you are in the northwest” actually was Chris Harper-Mercer, identified as the person who shot nine people to death at Umpqua Community College the next day before being killed by police. But one chilling line from the thread reads as a declaration of motive:
This is the only time I’ll ever be in the news I’m so insignificant
Harper-Mercer is reported to have blogged on the website Kickass Torrents, and a post there said to be his discusses a similar sentiment (Heavy, 10/1/15). Discussing an earlier highly publicized murderer, Vester Flanagan of Roanoke, Virginia, Harper-Mercer wrote:
I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.
The post described Flanagan as “a victim not only of his own perception but also of our social media soaked environment.”
“Why they did it”: Was the possibility of being featured on the cover of a national magazine part of the incentive?
These remarks track with what some social scientists have long been saying about events like mass shootings: that they are contagious, and that the contagion is spread through the media. In an article that ran in Extra! (7-8/99; reprinted from the Village Voice, 5/5/99) after the 1999 Columbine massacre, Jason Vest cited
people like Park Dietz and David Phillips, whose studies have found that news reports–not movies or video games–are the prime media mover in begetting copycats….
In one pioneering study, Phillips [of UC/San Diego] found that not only did single-driver car crashes increase after publicized suicides, and multiple-fatality crashes increase after mass murder/suicides, but the numbers seemed to have a relationship to the style and saturation of media coverage. In another investigation, UCLA’s Dietz (arguably the nation’s top criminal forensic psychiatrist) found that suicide, product tampering and mass murder lent themselves to imitation, and that the degree of imitation was inspired by sustained and sensationalized media coverage.
“I actually wrote a long series of suggested guidelines for the World Health Organization that would make stories like this less likely to be imitated without making it so the stories disappeared from the paper,” Phillips told Vest. “You have to think of these stories as a sort of advertisement to mass murder.”
Graphics detailing the sequence of mass murder–like this schematic of Columbine High School from the Denver Post–are literally roadmaps for copycat killers to follow.
In 2012, after the Sandy Hook elementary school mass murder, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote an Atlantic piece (12/19/12) offering tentative media guidelines for preventing mass murder contagion. Noting that “we know from research in many fields that establishing a path of action — a complete narrative in which you can visualize your steps and their effects — is important in enabling follow-through,” Tufecki suggested that
Law enforcement should not release details of the methods and manner of the killings, and those who learn those details should not share them. In other words, there should be no immediate stories about which guns exactly were used or how much robo-cop gear was utilized. There should be no extensive timelines — no details about which room was entered first or which victim was killed second. In particular, there should be no reporting of the killer’s words, or actions before or during the shooting.
She went on to advocate that “the killer should not be profiled extensively, at least not at first…. We do not need to know which exact video games they played, what they wore, or what their favorite bands were.”
Since 2012, when Tufekci offered her guidelines “as fodder for a conversation that I hoped will be taken up by media and mental health experts,” public mass shootings have accelerated–as you would expect them to do if copycats are inspiring copycats in a feedback loop. Perhaps it’s time to have that conversation about how media contribute to a cycle of mass violence–and how a different style of reporting on such violence might help put an end to it.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.
Perhaps a truly valid case for “classified information” on the grounds of “national security”?
So long as there are millions of guns in the hands of unhappy American teenage boys and their families, these events won’t end. Squelching the reporting on them, regardless of the titillation level of such “reportage,” without completely covering them up, will have little, if any effect. In fact, the lack of details will allow high school loners and other testosterone affected desperate Americans to imagine their own mass-murder scenarios. Hiding reality doesn’t change it.
The realities with which we need to deal include 300,000,000 pistols and rifles in the US, and the militarization of local and state police agencies with the resulting plague of police on citizen violence and death. If anything, more needs to be written about these stories. Perhaps there will occur an event so horrible that political action finally will be taken to deal with this situation–something that even the NRA and police benevolent societies can’t shrug off as part of the cost of the 2nd Amendment or keeping public order.
If one thinks that our government already does too little to deal with this public chaos, imagine what would happen if the stories were taken off the “front page” of reporting media, and if evidence could be kept from the public in citizen shooting cases–all to quell the imaginations and lust of potential copycat killers.
Ignorance might be bliss, but it’s also an irresponsible choice for citizens of a democracy.
It seems unethical to repeat the name of the alleged shooter. All this does is appeal to further encourage atrocities to satisfy these perverted male minds.
Decades of social science research indicate that violent and hyper-violent entertainment product play a variety of rolls in gun violence and in gun massacre murders in particular. Violent entertainment product, most of it freighted with political messaging, is enormously lucrative for the Big Media corporations that create, produce, distribute, and profit directly from it. These same Big Media corporations hire well-heeled gatekeepers such as David Brooks to prevent anything resembling a meaningful, productive public discussion of the role of violent and hyper-violent entertainment media product in the TV news programming they control. Moves to further limit the public discussion with regard to gun massacre murders, particularly “which exact video games they played,” will serve to protect Big Media corporations that profit directly and indrectly from the video games that are preferred by gun massacre murderers who use them as training aids.
The NRA/gun lobby shelters fraudulently behind the Second Amendment much as Big Media corporations that pump violent and hyper-violent media product into American popular culture with criminal abandon shelter fraudulently behind the First Amendment.
Here is video of David Brooks shutting down Tom Ridge less than 48 hours after the Sandy Hook Elementary School gun massacre:
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/david-brooks-shuts-down-former-gop-governor-after-he-blames-video-games-for-ct-massacre/
It’s the media’s fault.
it’s the gun’s fault.
It’s the people who dislike government’s fault.
good grief people. It is far deepee problem than tese surface issues you want to hate and get rid of so your ideas can run free. Gun restrictions are in place and schools are supposed to be free of all guns and we see how those stupid laws worked. Make more. It won’t stop black market or anyone from doing what they want.
Stop the media from mentioning key points that YOU think encourages people….won’t stop it. Didn’t stop the first time this happen. They had no info on previous cases and yet still chose to do it.
The government just recently made a deal with a country that hated homosexuals after they claim to care about gays getting married. They argue more in the Senate and House than in any other “job” that is suoposed to keep people safe. They’re not going to protect you. Laws do NOT protect. Laws only punish. If laws protectrd his guns would’ve vanished the moment he stepped into a gun free zone.
The problem is the mind and what it’s feed. You people refuse to see that. And that is why it will continue to happen. No matter how many freedoms you restrict.
Steve@ – I agree entirely. When we effectively supply sick people with deadly weapons, why would we expect any other outcomes other than violence? And the more efficient the weapon, the larger the body-count will be. If we made nuclear weapons legal for personal ownership, guess what the results would be? Especially in a country like ours that has a rich history of violence in our short history and even the recent years — it’s not like we’re a Switzerland or England, for example. (Perhaps they — especially England — had such a long history of nasty violence that they finally outgrew it in the last century, at least for the most part.?) A sane person will not be influenced by media accounts to become a copy-cat killer, while conversely an insane/psychologically disturbed person will find motivation and scenarios in fiction and elsewhere (i.e.; the most striking example I can recall of that was reading of a woman who drowned her 3 children because she said the Bible commanded her to do it).
While I dislike the media glorifying the violence of these acts, as well as others, the larger objection I have is that it tends to inure people to violence in the abstract. Nowadays when our military bombs another country, no one even raises an eyebrow, in part because people have exposed themselves to so much violence in the popular media and via newscasts (with their ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ sensationalism). However, I don’t think that we should be trying to control the media, we should be trying to control access to deadly weapons and also our cultural mindset about violence.
Lastly, I know that I personally would not put a lot of faith in a study co-authored by Park Dietz. I recalled that unusual name from the Jeffrey Dahmer trial here in Milwaukee, WI a couple of decades ago, and of how Dietz testified* that a man who had killed 15 men, and then had sex with and even ate portions-of the bodies, and kept body parts in his refrigerator, etc was ‘sane’, which beggars any sense of the word ‘sane’. As one person asked at the time, how many people DO you have to kill/fornicate/eat/save to be considered insane? (*http://www.criminalprofiling.com/psychiatric-testimony-of-jeffrey-dahmer/ )
Knowledge will protect us. Knowledge of where his guns came from, Knowledge of what meds/Drugs he was taking, Knowledge of who he hung with and who his doctors were, we want all the info because that is what will protect the Citizens.