Call them murderers or cowards. Add accused or suspected if required but
STOP SAYING THEIR NAMES.
We should say the names of heroes, not those who kill others.
I would suggest they be referred to by pseudonyms-- not nicknames, such as Jack the Ripper, The Zodiac, The Axeman, Phantom Slayer, Night Stalker, etc.
I don’t even mean The Green River Killer, The Golden State Killer, the I-70 Killer, etc.
I mean, really bland and common names, like Tom Smith, Bill Jones, John Miller-- even slightly geeky names, like Gene Johnson, Dick Williams, Arthur Taylor, Hank Brown.
That’ll give them anonymity, but, one hopes, just enough distinction that the public won’t be clamoring for “THE TRUTH!” and end up giving them even more attention, which would be bound to happen if they were John Doe 1, John Doe 2, John Doe 3…etc.
We should say the names of killers.
They deserve shame and condemnation, not anonymity. Their ideology needs to be exposed, not hidden, so that it can be decried and spoken out against.
Moreover, I can see numerous problems with a system where the media tells us “someone was arrested for murder today, but we’re not going to tell you who, why, how, or how we know they did it.”
I agree with Smapti completely. Killers should be named, shamed, and condemned. We need to know what makes them tick so we can hopefully avoid more killings in the future.
Also note that killers get named in other countries. Naming the killers is not the thing that makes these events so common in the US.
In general, it’s really surprising how many political arguments in the US can be shot down just by pointing out that other countries exist.
There is no way this can be constitutional, so that means the names will still be put out by media sources that realize that people will favor the sources that give them the the “inside scoop”. Any pressure brought on media companies to hide the names will be met with cries of “Censorship!” so, unless you have a way to enforce this idea, it can’t work.
Not saying their names would be a lot easier than solving the problem. Because the problem is guns, not names.
Anyone who can handle a dose of real facts can verify this easily for themselves. No other country has anything like the number of mass murders with guns. No other first-world country has anything like the number of murders and suicides using guns. I mean, ANYTHING like. And, by wild coincidence, no other country has anything like the number of guns in private hands. Imagine how these two facts could be correlated. Or don’t.
Well there are countries that are within the same order of magnitude guns per capita, like Switzerland.
OK, they have a fifth as many guns, which may not sound a lot, but it is compared to the number of mass shootings. They haven’t had one in the last 20 years.
And that gets to some of the simple policies that the US could enact to make mass shootings less common.
To buy a gun, or ammunition, in switzerland you need a permit. That requires that you don’t have a criminal record and you can lose the permit for example based on a psychological review. You can’t conceal carry, apart from transporting to a hunting or shooting site, in which case it must be unloaded. Open carry requires another license e.g. for security personnel.
The guns and ammunition available is restricted.
(From googling, I can’t find any rules about how many guns a person can own, but since the reason for ownership is supposed to be hunting and target shooting, and since there is a gun registry, I suspect there must be practical limits on how many a civilian who is not a gun shop owner could buy. But that’s just speculation)
Whenever the issue comes up in the US, we are all forced to hear the screamingly angry fear that so many men carry around with them and how set in concrete their conviction that only owning the technology enabling them to kill someone first can soothe it. This is something unique to the US at least in terms of how widely accepted and celebrated it is.
Call me crazy but somehow I can’t help but think that the roots of this lie in the centuries of black slavery. I think this because it seems like almost everything ugly and intractable in the US goes back to it.
I don’t know what motivated the OP. I was indulging in a little fantasy.
I should have been specific that I was referring to attention-seeking serial and spree killers. When BTK or the Zodiac come up with their own cool press names, we shouldn’t egg them on by using those names, and in fact, maybe ought to refer to them as Gene Smith, because it would piss them off.
Yes, I know it would not be constitutional, and yes, I know that the public reaction would just draw more attention to the case. It’s still fun to think about, for me anyway.
Google “Streisand effect”.
I forgot about that. The killer’s name would suddenly become a HUGE deal while everyone chased rumors and leaks and staked out their homes in hopes they had the right person.
The public’s not going to just shrug and go “Huh, guess we’ll never know who blew up that school bus or why… well, that’s okay.”
And today, we remember the dark anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s death, shot from a certain building in a large southern city by an assailant yet to be named…
…
(Oh, and if you google “The Streisand Effect”, google her house while you’re at it… )
Aye, put me in with these folks. Names aren’t the magical talisman making things happen. American society and culture has real problems and we should address them.
If a news outlet refuses to name names, the first thought that will come to the minds of many will be “What else are they hiding from us?”.
Suppressing names of murderers is impractical and smacks of censorship. Besides, where would we be without interviews of friends and neighbors who are utterly shocked because so-and-so was such a lovely neighbor.
What I’d like to see is an end to is the practice of referring to mass killers using middle names, like John Wayne Gacy and Joseph Paul Franklin.*
*no practical import other than it sounds silly. It’s not like a whole slew of innocent John Gacys were being confused with Mr. Clown.
Our preferred local news is following this guidance or at least the media guidance to try and minimize the importance of the shooter. The idea is that other people don’t feel like they can get famous by being a shooter. Instead they a focusing their coverage on the victims so we know a lot more about the people who died vs the shooter.
Personally, I’m more interested in the shooter and how and why they did what they did. That way we can focus on how to identify and stop another shooter rather than the victims who were just random people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe if their actions contributed to their deaths that would be interesting and useful but hearing about them getting to walk their daughter down the isle during COVID is less interesting then the fact that a single pistol was used with a second pistol as a back up.
Say their names. It’s news, and should be reported. Whatever the killers benefit from the purported or interpreted “fame” of their act, it ain’t gonna do for them what actual fame ever might do.
Say their names. Once. Thereafter refer to them as “Pitiful Loser #x”, where we start x from 1 and count up from there. Soon enough, being well known as “Pitiful Loser #1437” won’t seem nearly so glamorous to basement-dwelling shoot-em-up wannabes.
All the discussion above about wanting to understand motives with an eye to future prevention is nonsense. We understand the range of motives plenty well enough from the hundreds of similar cases before. What we lack is a robust screening system to comb the populace looking for people in that same mental condition. And quite arguably, a free country should lack such a screening system.
I can’t imagine a situation where a person who has decided to commit a mass shooting is deterred by the possibility that they won’t say their name on the news.
It’s pretty well studied. A lot of media outlets are trying to help not publicise suicides and murderers.