Sunday, December 16, 2007
Opinion
No more shooters
A parent in Candler Park wrote that he didn’t
appreciate us glorifying a killer. He was right. We were wrong.
By Stephanie Ramage
Back in April, we ran a photo on our front page of the shooter who killed 33 students and then himself at Virginia Tech. We were wrong to do that. Several of us objected to doing it, but in the end, the decision was made that by the time we hit the racks, his face was already everywhere. A parent in Candler Park later wrote to us and said his children saw that front page as they walked to school and he didn’t appreciate us glorifying a killer. He was right. We were wrong.
Many news outlets peppered the infosphere with the name and photo of the teenager who killed eight people at a mall in Omaha last week. They were wrong. Those same news outlets ran timelines that began with the mass murder of 13 students at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. They were wrong. Columbine didn’t start this sorry mess—a media intent upon feeding prurient curiosity about youthful murderers and victims did.
In 1966, the media had a field day with the mass killing of 14 students at the University of Texas by a gunman who picked them off from his perch in a tower. In 1989, major American magazines devoted multiple pages of photos to the fatal shooting of 13 students at L’Ecole Polytechnic in Montreal.
Guns aren’t new. There was a time when almost every household in America owned a gun, but such shooting sprees were unheard of. Was it the possibility of being shot to death back then that acted as a deterrent for the kind of disturbed souls who turn our schools and malls into shooting galleries today? I don’t believe so. The incidence of such shootings has increased as the reach of the media—mostly thanks to the Internet—has increased.
The reason so many school shooting timelines started with Columbine is because when a murderer kills himself, he leaves us looking for some big, faceless, hopefully short-term “trend” to blame. But violence has always existed. The media, however, has not. The blame is with us—the media, professional and “citizen.” We are the infamy merchants and it is time we stopped trading on the murderous lust for fame that our coverage of such events feeds. And the biggest culprit of all is the unregulated Internet. To those who would respond to me by saying that Web sites that unite the fans of school shooters are expressions of “free speech,” I say this: Freedoms are defined by the responsibilities that prevent them from being used to harm others. To call using the Internet to encourage murder “free speech” is like calling rape an expression of “freedom of assembly.”
SPStephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.