How the Media Can Help Prevent Mass Shootings
greatergood.berkeley.edu
greatergood.berkeley.edu
Sensationalism sells ads. You're asking the media to act against their own interest in order to serve a greater public interest. But if one outlet doesn't do this, another will. Therefore such coverage is inevitable with a competitive free press.
A non regulatory solution would involve making such coverage not sell more ads. That means making sensationalized murders less attractive to viewers. That means reshaping human character in a fundamental way. Quite a project.
This is the solution proposed in the article.
It doesn't have to be _novel_ . This has to be repeated until it sticks. Much like the way the media nowadays doesn't publish suicides much – in many cases, the cause of death is not even mentioned, to avoid copycats.
Mass communication is all about simple, repeated messaging.
I'm not trying to single out NPR, because I've seen many organizations do this. It's just at this point that this kind of reporting feels more like virtue signaling because when it comes time to actually report on a mass shooting they don't even follow what they claim is best practices.
But when I watch the victim I just get to relive the horror from my own life and so many past media circuses. My own experience is that I don't get a lot of motivation from wallowing in that kind of loss.
I want to know why, and the perpetrator has more to tell about that than the victims.
Innocent people get swatted and killed meanwhile with just this weird trick you can take the lives of many people and your reward will be a warm meal in a prison.
Further, the 'victim' channel should be more a celebration of the goodness that was removed from the world, thus inspiring others to go out and do more good.
But it's all academic; the news channels would never abandon their "if it bleeds it leads" mentality. It's far too profitable, because ultimately humanity is (in general) voyeuristic.
Edit: I want to emphasize the media makes content that is intended to be /fun/ to watch that is based on mass murder.
See John Wick, GTA5, etc. First mission in the GTAV is to kill unarmed constrained cop to teach player how to aim [1].
People play GTA in Bulgaria, Israel, Russia, Egypt, Thailand, Australia etc. Everywhere. Switzerland even where 70% of the population has weapons at home yet they don't kill each other every single week.
You know what's the difference? The access to weapons. But I guess that's the founding fathers wanted so it's all good
Well that's a new logical predicate, the either-and.
1. Four or more people killed in a shooting.
or
2. Four or more people shot in a single incident.
It's just an either-or, but the 'or' is listed as an 'and' since they're enumerating the two definitions of mass shooting. E.g. It holds up with definition 1, and it holds up with definition 2. I agree a CS major would write it differently but I wasn't confused fwiw.
Perhaps "works for both four or more P and four or more Q" avoids the issue.
that's only if you accept as default the interpretation favored by firearms activists. And in any case, even if the Founding Fathers had mass shootings in mind when they wrote the Constitution it doesn't mean it's correct or something to simply go along with. The 3/5ths of a human being bit has been dispensed with, for example.
That clause doesn't sound like they mean "unlimited guns for all".
Using the context before the comma, the "people" clearly means polis, as in society, not as in the "every human with a pulse" way we use it today.
The word "person" is used twice in the BoR, both times referring to individuals. The other 3 uses of "people" clearly refer to the collective polis.
This distinction, as people not merely being a plural of person, is laid bare in the fourth amendment: "the right of the people to be secure in their persons", that only makes sense if "people" means the abstract composition.
I encourage you to try, maybe take a firearms handling class, go to a range. Be informed about the thing you hate.
Your deflection and presumptuous personal attacks doesn't change the words written on that parchment either.
It's absolutely absent, it's not there. There is no right.
Perhaps there ought to be an individual right, but the second amendment doesn't have it.
For a deeper look at the issue dive into the positive rights vs. negative rights discussion which has been going on for ages. Sometimes it's phrased as positive vs negative liberty.
The short version, or my understanding of it, is negative rights means your rights were not given to you by your government, they are inherent, or given to you by God, or they are somehow a part of your very existence. This means your government can only take rights away from you but it doesn't have the power to ever grant you a right.
Positive rights on the other hand is the idea that rights are granted by your government. And since they are granted to you they may also be taken away.
>This means your government can only take rights away from you but it doesn't have the power to ever grant you a right.
My understanding is that the government is unable to grant nor deny you the right, only infringe upon it. The right is always there by virtue of your existence, so it can only be infringed upon.
For anybody following along (since daenz seems more informed than me already), the 9th Amendment and the discussions that led up to it flesh out the idea that the Bill of Rights merely guarantees that certain rights won't be infringed even though many other rights also exist but were not explicitly mentioned. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_the_United_...)
The biggest modern example I can think of is the non-enumerated yet Constitutionally guaranteed (according to the Supreme Court) Right to Privacy which played a pivotal role in the Roe vs. Wade decision.
It's well established by SCOTUS that the 2A covers ownership of firearms unconnected to militia use:
>District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), is a landmark case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Second Amendment protects an individual's Right to keep and bear arms, unconnected with service in a militia, for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home, and that the District of Columbia's handgun ban and requirement that lawfully owned rifles and shotguns be kept "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock" violated this guarantee.
>They also noted that though the right to bear arms also helped preserve the citizen militia, "the activities [the Amendment] protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual's enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia." The court determined that handguns are "Arms" and concluded that thus they may not be banned by the District of Columbia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller
It was a crazy long hard won battle to make that sentence mean something it clearly and obviously doesn't.
We also can't just blindly defer to all supreme court rulings. They swap their opinions and contradict themselves quite a bit.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/oyez.case-media.ogg/case_data/2007/...
Consider the future. We can print these. It's only going to get better. Are you going to ban non-DRM'd printers? Printer registration and therefore confiscation?
Weapons are the ultimate form of equality. Without them the strong rule the old and weak.
It's also the easiest way to tell if you live in a class system.
Also degrees punishment or lack thereof for crimes differing by offender, is the easiest way to determine class, not whether consumers can acquire a specific class of objects.
There is nothing more fundamental than preserving life. Whether a person, independent of social class, has the same rights to defend life and property is a hard dependency. The Freedmen are discussed in the audio file I linked above.
I'm not anti gun but it's just salesmen hiding behind a noble sentiment. The only thing the NRA ever bans are generic after market add-ons which make cheap guns work like more expensive ones
A technology that reduces the profit margins of gun manufacturers, that's the quickly banned object.
People can buy what they want, whatever. The thing I actually don't like is marketers underhandedly trying to sell me things by waving a flag in my face.
Then people act like consuming a product somehow counteracts system upheaval, give me a break. Any strategic despot would get the gun owners to work for him through packing and cracking the party support and spin the tyranny as protecting liberty. Many gun owners would need very little convincing that they're "liberty defending foot soldiers". That's how this game plays out.
GOA is a better org btw.
All of the other things they serve are better handled through institutions and organizing.
The combinations of the two, organizations with guns, that becomes a much more plausible threat to peace and liberty because it affords an opportunity to exploit a power dynamic which could lead to tyranny.
Yielding to the wisdom of crowds with weapons mean that fear and threat become larger tools of society building than reflection, collaboration, listening, and creativity.
It seems like you are pro-gun ownership, I'm not sure what your point is.
If you survey history, bad things are often preceeded by a segment of the population being disarmed.
> It was a crazy long hard won battle to make that sentence mean something it clearly and obviously doesn't.
I'd like "shall not be infringed" to have meaning again, thanks.
Your second example actually proves the opposite. In that context, “your person” is not referring to “you, a person” but “your body.” So the amendment is talking about the right of individual people to be secure from trespass upon their bodies.
When the Constitution refers to people as a collective, it capitalizes the term: “We the People.”
Your example also contradicts the use of “people” in the first amendment. (Unless you think the freedom of assembly is a collective right, than an individual right applying to groups of persons.) Same thing with the individual right to vote for senators in amendment 17.
I put it to you that shootings spring not from accessible weapons, or places to use them, but rather from moral bankruptcy. Christianity instilled morality into the United States, and has driven the country (in part) to seek a "better way". But that influence is dying, and with it the moral influence that was once passed from parents to children.
I'm not arguing for religion (though that would work), I'm arguing for the teaching of moral absolutes.
$5 that this gets report next to 0% coverage in the media though, all the while gun control 'outrage' blows up.
we should be looking at this systemically, is my point, and I'm sure the people looking for a quick scapegoat in firearms control and banning the scary looking guns will happily avoid this topic because it's a less preferable bogeyman.
Maybe it's time for some new federal laws. Some possibilities:
• make reporting about mass shootings subject to a mandatory "cooling off" waiting period, of 48 hours to 1 week, to reduce the sensational allure of such "hot" stories to the mentally-unstable
• ban the reporting of salacious details, like a shooter's name & motivations, or specific weapons & actions – specialized information which is mainly of use to deranged individuals, rather than normal citizens
• set up a government office which would "fact-check" & approve stories about mass shootings before they're published/broadcast
• require reporters to receive official training about responsible reporting, and mandate reporting licenses to exclude careless or sketchy/unstable people from risky reporting activities
Then again, maybe the Administration has already been doing this.
I don't think the founders ever considered 24-hour cable news, or sensational (and often false!) instant-reporting via the internet and social networks. That's what's feeding these copycat mass shooting events today. In 1791, when the 1st Amendment was written, it'd take days for news to reach the next city, and weeks to reach another state! And printing presses were generally only wielded by a small set of accountable people.
Of course there's no "reporting licenses" – yet. There are powerful lobbies that have shot down reasonable reporting restrictions, whenever they've been proposed. But such licenses could restore the balance of reporting to that which existed, when the Bill of Rights was written.
And the 1st amendment is just an amendment – not even part of the original Constitution. It can be further reinterpreted, or new exceptions added, or revoked, if necessary. We'd still have the other 9 amendments in the Bill of Rights, in any case.