Talk solutions, not names

Last Friday, hours after a man inflicted tragedy on an Oregon community college, County Sheriff John Hanlin used this statement to start a conversation on how the media should respond to mass shootings."I will not name the shooter. I will not give him the credit he probably sought prior to this horrific and cowardly act." Hanlin’s desire to not individually elevate the shooter was quickly thwarted. After this shooting, the media released the shooter’s name and began to try and construct the same narrative profile it did after Aurora, after Sandy Hook, after Charleston.

Yesterday we discussed the ongoing frustrations surrounding the gun control debate. Today, as we begin to pick up the pieces from last week’s tragedy, it is important to understand how the media presents those pieces and how it could be preventing us from having productive conversations and moving us backwards in others.

Traditional media will spend hours of television coverage and hundreds of articles trying to dissect the shooter’s life, thoughts, hobbies and possible motivations. In turn, social media’s greatest strength—the dissemination of easily digestible ideas—also becomes its greatest shortcoming. Given the incredible ideological and statistical complexity of gun control and gun violence in the United States, 140 characters or less will never fully or fairly engage the issue. Social media might pacify as people express their feelings, but real change and dialogue has to come from elsewhere.

Another objection we have to shooter scrutiny is it diverts attention away from broader realities. Although there is no question that hate, misogyny and discrimination motivate gun violence, these social problems exist around the world while weekly mass shootings simply do not. The United States makes up only 4.4 percent of the world’s population but has 42 percent of civilian-owned guns in the world. We have been home to 31 percent of global public mass shootings between 1966 and 2012. In all, more than 10,000 Americans are killed every year by gun violence.

The obsession with shooters is both troubling and dangerous. Researchers at Arizona State University found that 30 percent of mass killings appeared to be “copycat” crimes inspired by past killings. The more focus the media gives, the more this trend is fueled. We can explain why these mass shootings are wrong without trying to rationalize the illogical, even delve into relevant mental health issues without proliferating speculation. But ultimately, instead of annotating manifestos, we need to turn to solutions.

Finally, we find that mental illness is often a scapegoat in explaining shootings and halting gun control conversations, despite the fact that people who experience mental illness are more likely to be victims of general violent crime than perpetrators. While sometimes pertinent to the discussion, the media is curiously inclined towards discussing mental health when terms like “toxic masculinity” and “white supremacy” may be more applicable but are harder for viewers to swallow. Stigmatizing mental illness in this way spreads misinformation and creates additional problems. Even with the best intentions, mental health seems to only be of concern to gun freedom proponents when shootings come up and rarely otherwise.

As we mentioned yesterday, solving this problem is difficult because it requires cultural and institutional fixes. A step towards the former and encouraging the latter through focusing our discussion is to hold the media accountable. Immediately following such tragedies, the media and consumers must be attentive to the dignity of victims and survivors. Once the dust has cleared and the facts have been released, the media must then sustain conversation on how similar tragedies could be prevented instead of sensationalizing violence and lionizing the violent.