US newspapers run more photos of school shooting suspects than victims (2018)
journalistsresource.org
journalistsresource.org
I think PBS and NPR do an excellent job as non-profit orgs fundes by private and public money. And they have audited financial statements to show they are truly non-profit.
In some way the more you talk about the perps, the more you’re saying “You can do this and then you will be famous”
They are villified (rightfully so). But perhaps being famous for any reason is their goal.
Phillips, David P. “Airplane Accident Fatalities Increase Just After Newspaper Stories About Murder and Suicide.” Science, vol. 201, no. 4357, 1978, pp. 748–750. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1746810.
Of course if some portion of fatal plane crashes could be murder-suicides without any suicide note or other proof, then the same could be expected for lethal car crashes too, right? A suicidal person drives their car into the opposing lane, or into a tree or down into a river without leaving any suicide note. That could happen too.
In fact a subsequent study found such an effect:
> "Tarde and other classical sociologists paid a great deal of attention to the concepts of imitation and suggestion, but these concepts have been virtually ignored in modern sociology. This paper presents new findings indication that imitation and suggestion have a powerful have impact on social behavior: Three days after a publicized suicide, automobile fatalities increase by 31%. The more the suicide is publicized, the more the automobile fatalies increase. The age of the drivers is significantly correlated with the age of the person described in the suicide story. Single-car accidents increase more than other types just after the publicized suicide. After persentation of these and related findings, the paper discusses some ways in which the concepts of suggestion and imitation can be incorporated into sociological theory."
Phillips, David P. “Suicide, Motor Vehicle Fatalities, and the Mass Media: Evidence Toward a Theory of Suggestion.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 84, no. 5, 1979, pp. 1150–1174. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2778220.
CNN is running pics of the victims https://imgur.com/a/U6A5oCb
Personally I want to know about the murderer. I don't want this hidden from the public.
With the more recent shootings there has been a bit of a revival of going into the profiles of the murderers (mostly, it seems, on cable tv) but that is a bit of a departure of the norm.
I want to understand what the murderer's motivation was, to the extent that we can. On the other hand, I'd be happy to know that without knowing their name. I don't know if that's practical, but keeping the name out of most news reporting might measurably reduce the murderer's notoriety. I don't know if that would reduce mass shootings in the future, but it seems unlikely that it would hurt.
Newspapers are businesses and most have a simple equation in mind when deciding what content to use: use x s.t. x maximizes profit
Hopefully younger people will start to move away from traditional news sources as they realize how it skews ones world view towards negativity.
Note that these students arnt known for slacking off when it comes to homework, we deliberately didn't set a goal, it was something we planned to ask in class without notice.
Small sample, absolutely. But it was eye opening for the 4 teachers in this.
Not sure if this will help the conversation, but a little anecdote doesn't hurt every now and then :-)
The only time I'll read the news is during an election, because I want to be at least somewhat informed.
Otherwise, I might hear about it from others or if it shows up on HN.
In other words, mass-shooting victims are pictured less often, and smaller, for the simple reason that there are more of them. Maybe not the best reason, but that's precisely my point; no editor decides like "Hey the shooter is way more important and awesome, let's run his photo up front, and fuck the victims amirite!?"
This comment certified Hanlon's Razor compliant.
Victims are harmless. If not caught, the suspect isn't. Hence the latter gets far more attention.
It's the fact that the 23 people killed in school shootings in 2018 - tragic as these deaths are - have managed to take away all the attention from the over 3,000 children killed by motor vehicles that year. I can't help but notice that the media of the US is very reluctant to shine a light on an epidemic whose solution invariably involves cutting into the profits of its oil and automobile sponsors.
I understand that we have a desire to handle both problems, but to the degree that this these are public policy problems, we also need to remember that opportunity cost (for example, in the form of hearing agendas in legislative committee scheduling) is very real - every bit of attention on one problem is indeed a lack of attention on another.
The number of committee meetings in US legislatures (including both houses of congress) over ridiculous cosmetic gun control laws is absurd, while at the same time these bodies barely say a word about the extreme petronormative policies that dominate infrastructure planning and invariably lead to death and permanent disability for more young children than any other cause.
I don't even know what you're referring to here. Sandy Hook I guess? That was 27. Other than that, there have been no mass shootings in schools with that many children killed since 1927.
I was using 2018 numbers - 23 is the total number of people killed in mass shootings in or near schools throughout the US that year. It hurts to say this, but I think the sober reality is that this is a very small problem, affecting very few people. On the other hand, every community in the country is impacted by automobile impacts killing children.
School shootings are not a leading cause of death for kids in the USA. Instead, they cause terror: freaking active shooter drills, metal detectors and security theater, armed campus officers, all the crap that I really don’t want my kids to go through.
Shooting incidents don't cause those things. Administrators and school boards who are unwilling to engage in thought leadership do.
Kids die in auto accidents at the rate of auto accidents, a tragedy, a common tragedy, so no one pays much attention to it. But school shootings, they aren’t common at all, they are horrific, and no one wants to be caught doing nothing about it, and since we can’t get rid of the guns in the USA, active shooter drills it is.
FWIW, you are talking to the son of a school administrator who did just that. (or, more specifically, who facilitated the introduction of text alert systems, security systems, etc, but who successfully resisted metal detectors and active shooter drills)
I agree in many cases, but it's a circular problem:
1. Shooting event happens
2. Media whips up national frenzy, people start calling for politicians to do something
3. Politician's Syllogism happens due to pressure from #2
4. Repeat 1-3
The only way to break the cycle is to remove step 2.
We like to treat the symptoms but the root cause is so removed we can’t even begin to identify it let alone address it.
These events are exceedingly rare and not worth the amount of political capital spent on them. Automobile deaths? Opioid overdoses? Those are worth it.
One could argue that there is no need to spend political capital on opioid abusers, after all, they are just by and large harming themselves and not innocent bystanders.
I am quite right wing and self defense guy but I see the difference, and I would not like to have actual gun. One with rubber bullets would do just fine.
I had right wing nuts people telling me that if there is a terrorist you can help police by shooting that guy from your window and showing thumbs up to SWAT team. That is frikin stupid... SWAT team if they notice someone having gun and not being their team, guess what, they shoot first then ask questions. Showing thumbs up having gun will earn you a bullet. In case of active shooter hide your rambo dreams in pocket, then hide somewhere and wait for professionals.
Even if I donate all my earnings to starving children, there still will be some children dying from hunger, I cannot do anything about it.
Shootings in schools are possible to prevent in multiple ways.
I live in Europe and school shootings are not something that happens once a year or twice a year in here like in US. It something that happens once in IDK 10 years or something?
1) Cease all forms of oil and automobile subsidy.
2) (At the federal level) change the structure of infrastructure aid to states to incentivize pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure over automobiles.
3) Ensure the schools are accessible by pedestrians and cyclists and that they are located in areas which are surrounded by traffic-calming infrastructure.
4) (at the local level) build more curb-extensions, greenways, chicanes, diverters, and other structures to get cars away from schools, playgrounds, and other areas where kids play.
There are sound, scientifically-backed tactics for doing this, but most of them require getting a place on the agendas of several legislative committees who are probably too busy talking about banning a particular color rifle or some other asinine thing.
So punish the poor, basically?
Bicycles just don't cut it.
The better alternative is more investment in public transport which I assume has a better safety record than private vehicles.
Politicians wouldn't implement this because for every less well off individual they push closer to poverty, that's one less vote.
They are, why do you think the US has some of the lowest gasoline prices in the developed world? If you want to see what happens if you raise gasoline prices, look at what's happening in France. Monsieur Macron would love to have approval ratings as high as Donald Trump...
Sure, if you can afford to live in SF or wherever there is enough infrastructure to support that kind of lifestyle, people have an alternative. Your proposed solution does nothing for the rest of the population. It would just make driving more annoying and expensive for them.
Yeah, I just did it all last winter.
It would just make driving more annoying and expensive for them.
Where does the money for these subsidies come? Taxes. What if cutting oil & gas subsidies came with a proportional (averaged) reduction in taxes?
Good for you.
> What if cutting oil & gas subsidies came with a proportional (averaged) reduction in taxes?
You can't "cut" subsidies, because there are no direct oil and gas subsidies. There are favorable conditions (e.g. lack of taxation) that are sometimes construed as a subsidy and there are externalities (like carbon emissions) that aren't priced in.
You would have to raise taxes in one place (e.g. carbon/gasoline tax) and then lower them in another place (income tax?).
However, I thought the point of the parent was to raise taxes to make less people drive cars. My point is that if you do that, most people will still drive cars, they will simply pay more for it.
> Can you imagine the commute of someone in a suburban or rural area, in winter, on a bike?
Indeed I can, because there are areas of the US, and even more of Western Europe, where a mixed transit and bike trip can be achieved all year long. I suggest that you try out a commute-like trip from outside Portland or Amsterdam into the cities centers to see what I mean.
> It would just make driving more annoying
Boo hoo. Annoyance is a small price to pay for the power that comes with controlling a machine that kills 3,000 children in the USA alone.
> ...and expensive for them.
I'm not sure that's true.
1. Where the speed limit is low, the road design should reflect that. Road should be narrower and wind.
2. High speed/high traffic roads should have separated facilities for pedestrians and cyclists. Where they interact, cars should meet pedestrians and cyclists at slow speeds, and at a right angle to reduce blind spots. Pedestrians and cyclists should not have to go very far (height or distance wise) to get to a safe crossing facility, because nobody in their right mind is walking 10-20 minutes, or even 5 minutes out of their way to cross the road directly in front of them. An inconvenient, unusable crossing is not a safe crossing. And people of all ages should be able to cross the entire road in one light cycle.
3. Add another dimension to vehicle safety tests; what is the pedestrian survivability of a head-on impact at 30MPH? I have seen literature suggesting that some part of the increase in road deaths can be attributed to the increasing popularity of SUVs, which are higher off the ground and thus prone to striking pedestrians in more sensitive areas while also giving more leeway for pedestrians to go under the car than over.
Should we really be comparing the two? I mean, even as a teenage driver, you are warned about the dangers of distracted driving, DD, etc. Automobile accidents are a common occurrence and a risk that people willingly take and accept whenever they enter their car.
I’ve seen multiple stories in a night about automobile crashes on my local news and not national, which is how it should be. Auto accidents usually only affect the community it happened in, not the US as a whole. When we understand the damage—physical and mental—gun violence causes to society as a whole compared to auto accidents, it is no surprise that gun violence is a much more out-of-left-field event than an auto accident.
To combat this, though, would you suggest we ban all motor vehicles? You see how silly that is to read? Even if it is silly to you, attempting to regulate the automotible industry would be a lot harder than putting limitations on available guns. Hell, we don’t even have a solid public transportation system that would be able to handle all of the commuters who gave up their cars to combat the auto accident statistics.
I assert that this is a naked strawman. Do you think that Vision Zero and similar projects deserve such a simplistic response?
There are proven ways to reduce automobile deaths, but they require political will and action.
The main way to prevent these types of mass shootings would be to ban almost all guns. Some might say that is also “silly” to read. Politicians typically point to a specific type such as military-style semiautomatic rifles (“assault weapons”) that are scary—looking but aren’t especially deadly or even commonly used for mass shootings. This most recent mass shooting was committed with a .45 pistol.
Unlike car ownership, gun ownership is also a constitutional right here in the USA, which means you’d need a huge supermajority to repeal that portion of the constitution.
Are all type of guns and weapons legal? If there are exceptions how are those constitutional? I am not from US so I do not understand why not work in steps, make very hard to obtain guns that have high potential of killing people, don't make them illegal but make the permit of owning such a gun very hard to obtain and keep defensive guns (low caliber pistols) more easy to get but not too easy. I assume that are people making money selling guns like they are people making money selling cigarettes so there will b a lot of lobby,PR and campaigns to keep the things are they are now.
The problem is literally every gun has a “high potential of killing people” unless you are talking about a museum piece from the 18th century or something. Politicians today may act like a certain subtype of weapon, such as “assault weapons”, are especially dangerous but mass shooters are already sadly showing this isn’t the case. Both this VA beach mass shooting and the Virginia Tech mass shooting were committed using pistols.
The vast, vast majority of guns sold and owned in America would fall into the categories of: rifles, shotguns, handguns. All of them, regardless of the caliber or whether they are “semi auto” or use a different modern reloading mechanism (revolver, lever, bolt-action) are deadly weapons.
Regarding our law, the constitution requires the “right to keep and bear arms” be protected. Courts have allowed various bans around the edges of the right, but have prohibited banning any widely-used category of modern firearm: _The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to self-defense) violate the Second Amendment. The District's total ban on handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition on an entire class of "arms" that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense. Under any of the standards of scrutiny the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights, this prohibition--in the place where the importance of the lawful defense of self, family, and property is most acute--would fail constitutional muster_ ( https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/554/570.html )
Small caliber bullets have obvious smaller killing potential in my mind, please let me know if my intuition is wrong but a small bullet would have less energy, so it will have a larger drop so it won't be effective on large distance.
What is ironic is that I read here on HN an article about some type of knives that are illegal in New York, so is a bit ironic you can forbid some knives but not some guns(or at least make it harder for people to obtain them)
Here is an example of “small pistols” that were in the top 10 most used guns by criminals. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_night_special
> Nonetheless, three of the top ten types of guns involved in crime (as represented by police trace requests[4]) in the US are widely considered to be Saturday night specials; as reported by the ATF in 1993, these included the Raven Arms .25 caliber, Davis P-380 .380 caliber, and Lorcin L 380 .380 caliber
About fast reloaders, you can have laws for those too.
Moreover, when there were mass accidental deaths, as in the case of recent Boeing Max's, there was enough coverage.
You mean mass negligence deaths?
Perhaps they were even mass manslaughter, but that is for a court to decide.
The media is reluctant to shine a light on behavior where the viewer is responsible.
The media knows very well that their average viewer is an irresponsible fool, but they also know that viewers don't like to be lectured to.
It also just so happens that large parts of the US are either unlivable without a car, or unaffordable. That's just the reality, maybe a 50-year infrastructure plan on behalf of chairman Sanders will change that, but not much else.
> Every time you hear about guns killing children, challenge the narrative by saying, "is talking about this taking away from our opportunities to rethink some of our car-dominated infrastructure?"
The word for that kind of behavior is "whataboutism". It's not going to win you anything.
When I was a child (25 years ago) we had only 1 TV channel, and weekly there was 30 minutes broadcast only about road accidents, it was created in collaboration with the police and the purpose was educative, to show the consequences of not respecting the rules.
The problem this days is that media needs to make money and not to educate, even the national TV and radio needs to compete with the private TV so everything now is similar on all channels mostly.
Edit: I still see traffic accidents reportd on our local news here, is this not happening in US but on the local news? Or is your point that there should be a news item for each car accident, I don't think you can compare a regular accident with a mass shooting though, maybe with a regular shooting. a mass shooting is more like an accident involving a bus full of children.
Let's look at this through the lens of something less emotionally fraught. My girlfriend used to be absolutely terrified to fly. I kept telling her that we were way more likely to get into an accident in the Uber on the way to the airport than the flight itself, but that didn't always help. She may have understood that intellectually, but emotionally, there was a disconnect. Here's my hypothesis:
- News Coverage -- (and ill get to this more in a sec.) The news (at least in any decent size market) cannot POSSIBLY cover every motor vehicle crash. They are far too common, and, therefore, probably not news. I suppose you could cover something like an uptick in motor vehicle crashes, or an abnormally dangerous intersection, but at that point you're now talking about a trend and not a specific incident with specific victims, and you might as well be talking about a budget.
- Fundamental understanding of the mechanics -- The average person can probably tell you why a car moves. Now, I am not saying they will be doing their own oil changes or any more serious car maintenance (I live in NYC and do not even own a car), but they can probably tell you about the pistons and the engine and how it turns the wheels and stuff. Ask an average person why a 175,000 lb metal jetliner can soar five miles over the surface of the earth for hours at a time, and I am less confident you will get a reasonable answer. And even if you do, there may be less of a connection between the words they are saying and whether or not they really believe it. Planes in the sky are magic.
- Who is in control -- Most of the time if you are in a car, you are driving -- or, someone you know and trust is driving. (I say most because of cabs and Ubers and maybe a carpool that you just don't like.) Human beings tend to believe that THEY can avoid danger. Yes, those other people crashed their cars, but I'm a GOOD DRIVER. When you're in an airplane and watching "The Hangover II" (what an amazingly bad movie, btw) you have to trust a stranger to fly this thing that you don't really understand (see above point.)
So -- same thing with mass shootings. They're rare (or at least used to be, I do wonder if the recent uptick in shootings is having an effect on people's interest, though thats another issue. They are still rare, compared to things like car crashes.)
- We can cover school/workplace/church/etc shootings because they're aren't 20 in an hour. - We don't really understand why someone would be driven to do this. Much like maybe knowing how a plane works, we may be able to spout talking points about mental health and access to weapons and all of that, but we (hopefully?) cannot REALLY understand what drives a person to wake up in the morning, assemble an arsenal, and murder a bunch of people. There's a form of fascination to this, regardless of how perverse. - Once again, we are not in control. We might be driving the car, and think we can swerve out of the way when we need to, but if you are sitting in an office/school/church and someone comes in firing an automatic weapon, you are fundamentally not in control of the situation.
News reflects what people are interested in, or at least it should. For all of the talk about what the media covers, there really isnt a "THE MEDIA." The media is a group of people like me who live in communities and have friends and families, and -- I hate to break this to you -- while we may have pressures from external sources direct or indirect, we do not have weekly meetings where we conspire what agendas we want to push or make people fear. (They became monthly meetings because of a problem with the caterer.)
People are afraid of school shootings, much like they can be afraid of plane crashes. They dont understand them. They fear not being in control. They are rare. It's harder to say "that won't be me. And so news covers it, and parents worry, and citizens demand solutions*
*Also I hope it goes without saying that there SHOULD be a solution. We don't take car crashes lying down -- there are constant safety improvements added on to cars that have made driving fundamentally safer.
If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended, we'd be grateful.
You might also find these links helpful for getting the spirit of the site:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
I've been recently paying attention to this and one of the latest shootings involved a trans student in the process of transitioning. It had barely any coverage.
There really is a bias in the media that is now bordering on censorship.