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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

NPR did a good story on a study that examined what shooters DO and DO NOT like.

They like videos of chaos and screaming.

They like their photo shown.

They don't like stories about the victims that make the victims seem like they're human. What they were doing before the shootings, things they did with their lives, etc.

They don't like stories about the community itself that aren't just about the event (shooting).

I noticed NPR does a lot of stories about the the victims.

Nothing should be legally restricted, but I think news orgs can do their job 100% and still participate in a potentially helpful manner. To be clear there is no science that says doing any of these things reduce any amount of shooting or such, but it seems like a reasonable theory that if they see shootings result in coverage they don't like, it might discourage them if they think they won't get what they want.

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Could you link to a source? This is interesting to me but I'd like to know more about their method for arriving at those conclusions. I wasn't able to find the article/study you're referencing.

I'll do some searching. I know it was on NPR, and within the last 3 years.

(just leaving a comment for future reference because I'm also interested)

Was going to ask the same. I’d love to read it.

Here's a link you can look at:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5296697/

Perhaps:

Thresholds of violence: How school shootings catch on, by Malcolm Gladwell https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-...

Gladwell interviewed about the article on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition: https://www.npr.org/2015/10/13/448182623/how-riots-may-help-...

I think he mentioned it in The Tipping Point as well, which may be in one of your links.

There's a research PDF as well I'm unable to link to because the file opens directly on my phone. But if you Google "On the media mass shooting", a link to ifa.org might come up.

I googled that query because I remember hearing it from the On the media podcast.

There is a whole campaign around this. I've read through some of their stuff but if you're digging and see some red flags please bring it back here because I'd love to know.

https://nonotoriety.com/

Why shouldn't it be legally restricted?

You're forced to wear seatbelts for safety reasons, why shouldn't you be forced to keep killers anonymous.

In the US, the 1st amendment and current case law don't support restricting that kind of speech. Only if there's an immediate, specific reaction, can the speech be curtailed, and even then it's difficult. Trying to incite a riot, for instance, can be restricted, as it could have the immediate effect of causing a riot in the area. Saying a mass shooter's name doesn't cause an immediate response, nor can you specifically say who or where will be affected, so under the current case law, cannot be restricted.

Well then it seems the 1st amendment ought to be fixed if it's that obviously broken.

No.

Free speech is a natural right enshrined in our Constitution, and it’s not “obviously broken”. It’s a fundamental principle of our country.

Journalist must be free to report. Now, they could certainly be more responsible, as in this case - but it’s not the governments prerogative to make them so.

Sounds to me like it's not only broken but it should be moved from the constitution to the bible if it's that religious for you.

The first amendment guarantees freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech. Those are fundamental values of the American culture from its beginning.

That's not "broken" just because you don't like it. We chose a different path from the broken European model.

Well good luck with your broken path, we tried them all in Europe. Don't forget we have literally two thousand years of experience.

Yeah, feudalism is definitely a better path. lol.

You are aware that our founding fathers had the benefit of all that thousands of years of experience to inform how they created our form of government, right?

I'm surprised that what shooters like/do not like can be generalized like this. I would have expected that it was more dependent upon the specific psychology of the shooter than this.

IIRC a lot of mass shooters are focused on the aftermath and coverage / impact of their acts and what they imagine the media coverage is was important to a lot of them.

I suspect there are exceptions.

Also due to the number of people available for study I have to think certainly possible that things aren't as the study implied.

Especially interesting that this is 'known' considering how most shooters die in the event.

A lot of the research about shooters can be based on their manifestos/writings, and many shooters have shown interest in previous shooters and coverage of them, so that's probably where a lot of this could be drawn from.

Especially since a lot of shooters end up dead by the end of the shooting, so it would be difficult to determine what they like about the reports of their amok run.

It is less about their enjoyment of the coverage post-factum (which they are, obviously, aware they won't be able to witness themselves), and more about "they will be talking about and covering my deeds even after I am gone, so i will go out with a splash." It is just a perverted version of "leaving a legacy" behind and being immortalized in the public eye.

If you take that away, there is not much "glory" or "legacy" left behind, which certainly would discourage a giant chunk of shooters.

Note: I watched the first season of that show, thought it was terrible, and was told that the second season was even worse. The writers should have presented the topic in a better and more mature way, but they ended up doing a poor job of it. While I believe that the show should not be banned and creators should not be held responsible for it (for many reasons, with the main two being the overreach of censorship and freedom of speech; it is a work of fiction, after all), I do believe that the coverage of shootings and similar events by the mainstream media should be somewhat regulated/normalized. Whether it happens through a carrot (news self-regulating themselves) or stick (gov-t imposed regulations) is up to them, but I would much rather prefer them take the carrot.

> They don't like stories about the victims that make the victims seem like they're human.

If you're going to kill someone, actually take a person's life, the way mass shooters do, you can't possibly feel like that person is human. It's probably different for, say, a one off killing where it's more personal, or a serial killer who's projecting. But a cowardly shooter walking around killing people, they've completely convinced themselves the people they're killing aren't people, aren't human, are just targets.

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