Mass Shootings and the Media

     Rin Kelly, a writer for Salon.com wrote an interesting article that asks does the media coverage of mass shooting inspire killers to act.  By surrounding the victims houses, chasing down crying people and publishing every rumor about the killer and their motives before they can be verified the media is giving more than 15 minutes of fame to the killers.   What can be done to encourage the media to show some restraint and respect for the victims and the broken families they leave behind? 

         In the wake of tragic, life shattering event like mass shootings it is easy for people to watch TV news and let in shape the story as every horifing detail comes to light.    

         "(In 1999 right after the shooting at Columbine) Rumors of bullying and vengenance quickly hit airwaves, where the school's nearly 2,000 kids heard and absorbed them. Teenagers eager to talk then repeated them back to a 24-hour media eager to speculate,"

           In this article Kelly points out that the inaccurate stories and speculator that follow mass shootings can have long term effect on how the public's perception of why these things continue to happen.  

   "In the process, (In the coverage of Columbine) we demonized an already vulnerable population of teens, subtly vilified the victims themselves, drew a roadmap to infamy for copycats, pretended that the rarest types of violence are our most pressing violence." 

       Towards the end of the article Kelly talks about behavioral expert Loren Coleman the author of "The Copycat Effect", who argues that many of the many of the killers in the most recent mass shooting are following the methods that were layout in the wall to wall coverage of earlier shootings like Columbine. 

     "Now with mass shootings too, he says 'we're even having the copycat down to the type of gun."

           Here is an article from July that shows how several newspapers covered the movie theater shooting with a picture of the killer and the body count.  There must be a better way to memorialize the victims and talk about what can be done to deal with the problems of gun violence instead of glorifying the killers and their carnage.  It takes time to put together good pieces that go below the obvious headline and that is something that few news organizations have the patients to put out.  

Will Newtown Lead to New Day?

               
               As the Out-of-town media roll out of Newtown after the last funeral, and the focus of the all day news channels returns to a renewed countdown to the fiscal cliff many are wondering if Newtown will lead to a turning point in the war against gun violence or just another scary number (27 dead, 20 of them children). If England was able to enact major changes to its gun laws after the Dunblane school massacre in 1996 and Australia found a reason to give up most of their guns after the Port Arthur massacre, why didn't American make any significant changes after Columbine in 1999 or Virginia Tech in 2007 or the Aurora in July, 2012?  
              This latest massacre pushed President Obama to finally jump off the cliff and call for a commission to look into what can be done to stop the violence. Something he was unwilling to talk about even after the massacre in a movie Theater in July.  But that unfortunate event happened in the middle of an election and this one happened 11 days before Christmas.  After several days of conferring on what would be the best way to respond the NRA decided to release a statement. If only we had guns in every school we would have no more tragedies like this.  However that didn't work in Columbine. Many people responded to Newtown by giving up their guns at gun by back events like this one in Los Angeles. Others are using Facebook to encourage people to post their random acts of kindness. 
              No matter when these act of senseless murder occur they always inspire a lot of talk and very little action as the national spotlight moves on to the next distraction.  If no major changes come out of this it is bound to happen again.  Its not a matter of if but when. "If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, now incable must Man be of learning from experience." George Bernard Shaw.