Attention Media: Stop Publishing the Names of These Mass-Murdering Monsters

I won’t say his name. I won’t say his name because that’s what the 23-year-old monster who opened fire on innocent children at Annunciation Catholic Church during a Mass in Minneapolis on Wednesday wanted.

I won’t say his name because his final gasp—his suicidal wish—was to take the life or do bodily harm to as many helpless, innocent children as possible before taking his own. Or have the police take it for him.

I won’t say his name—either of his names—even as some members of the media grapple with the gender identity of this monster. I won’t say his old name, or his new one.

Much will be written trying to comprehend why this hate-filled monster did what he did. But it won’t help. The nature of the evil that brought darkness and death into that Catholic church this week is unexplainable.

Changing our gun laws won’t stop this kind of evil from darkening our public places and sacred spaces, and tightening up our mental health laws won’t either.

But has anyone at the highest ranks of media and journalism pondered the notion that what these deranged monsters want is to leave this Earth in a blaze of glory, with the world focused on?them? With the media itself a collaborator?

The words of the 26-year-old monster who murdered nine people before taking his own life at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College in 2015 revealed a disturbing trend in America: mass-shooter suicides. Suicides that would have never been national stories without a body count.

Here’s what he posted about another deranged gunman—the man who took the lives of two journalists in Roanoke, Virginia—before his shooting spree:

“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 was removed. The killer’s words, his motivation and intention, still haunt. And still kill.

The 23-year-old man I won’t name expressed similar thoughts in his final post—his video manifesto—making several references to the young monsters in Columbine whom he not only admired but emulated.

One of the heroes in that Oregon incident, Sheriff John Hanlin, refused to give the mass murderer what he wanted.

“I won’t give him the credit he sought with this horrific act,” Hanlin told the press. “You’ll never hear me mention his name.”

Hanlin was right. It’s the names of the?victims?we should know, not the evil gunmen. Eight-year-old Fletcher Merkel’s life was cut short by the monster I won’t name.

“We will never be allowed to hold him, talk to him, play with him and watch him grow into the wonderful young man he was on the path to becoming,” his father Jesse told reporters.

Ten-year-old Harper Myoski’s life was also cut short by the monster I won’t name.

“Our hearts are broken not only as parents, but also for Harper’s sister, who adored her big sister and is grieving an unimaginable loss,” her parents told a local TV station.

NoNotoriety.com is a website dedicated to?not?giving mass killers the attention they crave. The site, launched after the Aurora, Colorado, mass shooting in 2012, expressed the wishes of many of the victims’ families.

“In an effort to reduce future tragedies, we challenge the media, calling for responsible media coverage for the sake of public safety when reporting on individuals who commit or attempt acts of rampage mass violence thereby depriving violent like-minded individuals the media celebrity and media spotlight they so crave.”

It’s not some obscure theory. In 1987, four teenagers in Bergenfield, New Jersey, entered a car in a garage after making a suicide pact, starting the engine and dying minutes later of carbon monoxide poisoning. The national media descended in full force. My dad was the superintendent of schools in that town at the time, and the media’s appetite for the gruesome details was insatiable. “The vultures,” a school board member called them. Townies agreed.

A rash of similar suicides soon erupted nationwide, leading?The New York Times?to run a front-page headline that put media coverage on call: “Pattern of Death: Copycat Suicides Among Youths.”

“Hearing about a suicide moves those teenagers at risk closer to doing it themselves,” David Shaffer, then-head of the Suicide Research Unit at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, told The New York Times. “The news coverage of teenage suicides can portray the victims as martyrs, and the more sentimentalized it is, the more legitimate—even heroic—it may seem to some teenagers.”

The phenomenon led to a 1994 study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention titled “Suicide Contagion and the Reporting of Suicide.” “Nonfictional newspaper and television coverage of suicide has been associated with a statistically significant excess of suicides.”

Add three decades and the impact of social media and 24/7 cable news to the mix, and add a twist—mass shooting suicide—and you may wonder why no members of the media are talking about their role in these events.

One of the best movies of 2014 was?”Nightcrawler.” Jake Gyllenhaal starred as a photographer whose specialty was getting photos at the scene of an accident or crime and selling them to local news stations. By movie’s end, Gyllenhaal’s creepy character was a?participant?in the news, causing a shootout that would never have happened but for his presence.

An overwhelming majority of Americans deplore journalists for profiting from human grief. And many of us wonder if these mass-suicide shootings would happen as often if the media didn’t aid and abet the ambitions of these evil killers.

Here’s hoping the media leaders follow the advice of NoNotoreity.com and Sheriff Hamlin. If you want these publicity-seeking monsters to stop doing what they’re doing, stop rewarding them. Stop giving them the notoriety they so desperately crave.

And stop pointing fingers at the Second Amendment, and start looking at the First instead. The government shouldn’t prohibit you from publishing the names of these mass murdering monsters; your conscience should.

Originally published by Newsweek.

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