“Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”

Media 52 Comments

Stephen Hunter;

It seems odd that in the orgy of recrimination, faux solemnity and glycerine tears of the past few days on the issue of “What can we do?” no one has mentioned something that is A.) Immediate, B) Cheap and C) Bound to be effective and at the least, D) Certainly worth trying.

It’s been mentioned plenty, actually, just not much by our betters in media. They have soap to sell, after all.
But when it comes to things that haven’t been mentioned…

52 Replies to ““Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.””

  3. You forgot the most important part of the article:
    “As of January 1, 2013, we will not publish or broadcast the name, photograph or background of anyone who attempts or commits a mass murderer of the active shooter variety. Further, we will work within our professional culture to ‘enforce’ this rule until it becomes a cultural norm. Names of killers will only be acknowledged at the time of adjudication or the issuance of a posthumous investigative finding.”

  4. “Fame” is irrelevant to someone who shot himself.
    Posted by: LAS at December 18, 2012 11:02 PM
    Can’t you grasp the simple fact that others will copy this horrible act for the notoriety it brings?

  5. “Fame” is irrelevant to someone who shot himself.
    Yeah. Noone in history has ever thought in terms of “I wanna be remembered”.
    Mind you, it can’t be done. Certain killers will always be memorable. This particular little monster doesn’t seem interesting, but others are. There is a glamour to evil.

  6. I left that out, because you’re supposed to go to the original to read the full piece.
    And I don’t think these shooters do grasp completely the fact that they’ll be dead. I think they most perceive death in the abstract, “as seen on TV”. In other words, not any more real than the characters they’ve dressed up as.

  7. I agree. Almost every one of these shooters commits suicide. They know they’re going to die soon and want fame and notoriety after death.

  8. Those of us who are in the sport shooting community have been saying for years that the montreal polytechnic shooter should be forgotten and his name never published or uttered. However, every December the Coalition for Gun Control and all their man-hating, femi-nazi friends dig up the bodies and drag them out for display before they dance in their blood once again for political, and monetary, gain. They give lame speeches about confiscating guns and curtailing freedoms to “protect women”. But to their continuing disappointment the crowds are getting smaller every year since it has been more than two decades and they have milked this cow dry.
    Journalists are slow learners. They have created a situation where psychos are trying to out-do the shooters before them with higher body counts. Every time they sensationalize a mass murder they are setting the stage for the next one. And by ignoring stories of shooters who are thwarted by armed citizens they are helping to embolden potential mass murderers by giving them a sense of being able to go out and murder with impunity. It has taken decades for the media to realize that they are part of the problem and need to address how they report/misinform on mass shootings and stop helping influence the next one.

  10. I just turned on TVO to watch “The Agenda”….
    Paikin had schedualed a Canadian “mental health lawyer”, A U of T Psychiatry Professor, and a pair of American “mental Health journalists”.
    The agenda was clearly obvious….these critters launched into a anti-gun, anti-second amendment, and anti-NRA circle jerk…….
    Nothing about mental health other than pro-gun mentality and flyover country were mentally deranged.
    This pattern was established in the first 5 minutes …Time was spent discussing the insanity that the Bushmster rifle was selling briskly…..with no mentioned that it had never been used and was found in the car trunk. After 15 minutes, I found something else to watch.

  11. …They’ll just kill whoever is near enough, then advance to the next level.
    It’ll be interesting to see what the National Rifle Association has to say during their friday news conference. And if some other experts can recover what’s left of the murderer’s computer hard drive.

  13. I think this is just a way to cover up their journalistic incompetence and assuage the guilt pressed on them for their hyper-insensitivity. How many facts have they gotten wrong? How many relatives and friends have they bothered? It does them no good to play the high moral ground card now.

  14. Rather than use the name of the killer or the terms ‘alleged gunman’ or ‘suspect’ etc. everyone should use the term ‘loser’ in all public forums, police statements, news reports, etc.
    Would it be possible to pass a law to legally change the shooters name to Stupid Loser? I’m also in favour of disposing of their remains like the Israelis did with Eichmann. Cremate them, put the ashes in a bucket and dump them in the middle of the sea, outside the territorial limit.

  17. “Would it be possible to pass a law to legally change the shooters name to Stupid Loser?”
    Remember how it used to be really cool for the kids to put up giant “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” posters on their bedroom walls, like the stickers Tipper Gore forced onto cassette covers? It would be a more psycho version of that. Only now it would probably take the form of neck tattoos.

  18. It’s often said by young degenerates on the Internet, of the sort who wish they dared follow Adam Lanza’s example, that “lulz is the only reason to do anything.” “Lulz,” of course, is schadenfreude, sport at somebody else’s expense. A perfect creed for someone born without a soul or a sense of right and wrong, however debased by human vanity.
    Fame? No. Marc Lépine wanted fame, clearly, leaving a manifesto behind. Adam Lanza left nothing behind, not even his hard drive which, it’s been learned, he took pains to destroy. What reasons he had for killing his mother he took with him to hell. There’s far less mystery about why he killed innocent children, though. He did it because he thought it would be great crack to make innocent people suffer.
    To put it another way, he did it for the lulz.

  19. Sorry to say I side with the media here.
    First, it’s their job to report. Second, it is their job precisely because we want the information. Third, the author is more correct than he knows – when these stories aren’t told in the media, the internet will report it. It’s hard to imagine anyone could do worse than the media on accuracy and even handedness, but the internet will change in the absence if big media.
    Someone raised a good point that a suicide victim doesn’t care about notoriety. Others pointed out that there are demonstrated cases of exactly that. These guys are forgotten, and so are the victims.
    I don’t have an answer, but banning guns isn’t one and this isn’t another.

  20. Dick Slater >
    I agree with your assessment for the most part, although you can never really tell the motives behind crazy.
    One thing to add, is that if I understand things correctly, his mother taught or worked at the school in some capacity.
    There’s probably some connection in his motive for going there, kill her twice? Hurt her further beyond death?
    Just say’n.

  21. “It’s time for the media to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.”
    That includes the media being the public relations arm for terrorists. How much would the power of terrorist acts be reduced if every atrocity wasn’t pumped into to the world’s living rooms?

  23. First, it’s their job to report. Second, it is their job precisely because we want the information.
    Why are the public entitled to everything they want spread across the MSM for their vicarious enjoyment?
    What happened to journalistic integrity and responsibility?

  24. Media’s job to report the FACTS???
    I get better performance at the local coffeeshop. Sure the initial reports are sketchy, but after a couple days, the boys REPORT WHAT THEY KNOW!
    The media lapdogs, well they never studied that part.

  26. Why do you need to know a shooters name or see their picture? How is that information useful to you other than satisfying a morbid curiosity? Why should it be spread across the MSM?

  27. NO60, 12:42a.m. — from the WAPO article:
    Constant deadlines, intense competition, reduced news staffs and instantaneous transmission via social networks, Silverman says, make it likely that it will happen again. “People have to realize that this is going to happen a lot,” he said.
    Constant deadlines. Imagine that — almost like they live in the real economy, or something. If you couple the Hunter comments together with the final paragraphs of this article, you might not like where this could all lead.
    We are not able to do a respectable, thorough and professional job of reporting the news because of cut-throat competition — we need a stable funding environment, and an industry-driven consensus on what product the market place gets. Seems to me to be the kind of argument that the UAW and CAW would make — we are not able to produce a quality product because of foreign competition.
    We all know where that ended up.

  28. In case anyone needs affirmation that they’re on the right side of history, the CBC’s Gollom opines on teachers carrying guns.

  29. Switzerland and Israel have mandatory national service. Most citizens serve in the military and are issued a battle rifle. After their period of active service, the rifle is set to semi-auto only, and they retain it in their possession. Both countries have some of the lowest crime rates in the world. The difference in both cases as compared with America is that they don’t glorify violence.
    The problem isn’t guns, its that America has a morally degenerate culture that worships and glorifies violence, sex, money, and material success at any cost. The moral decay cuts across all classes from rich to poor, and all political parties. America has become extremely polarized and almost everyone thinks the problem is ‘them’ not ‘us’. It’s much like the terminal cancer that 3 out of 5 have. There is no cure.
    “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.”
    “The historical cycle seems to be: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage once more.”

  30. Roger Waters may have had something –
    “And when they found our shadows
    Grouped around the TV sets
    They ran down every lead
    They repeated every test
    They checked out all the data on their lists
    And then the alien anthropologists
    Admitted they were still perplexed
    But on eliminating every other reason
    For our sad demise
    They logged the only explanation left
    This species has amused itself to death”
    It seems we are heading towards a world where we are assaulted 24/7 by war, disasters and atrocities because that’s what makes the viewing figures rise.

  31. No.
    No, no, no.
    It’s not violent video games. It isn’t TV. It isn’t satanic rock music. It isn’t assault rifles.
    It is liberal f-knuckles raising ‘social experiments’ rather than children – and they do that in broken homes, not functional family units. And rather than parenting them, they ‘bond with them’ or they ‘partner with them’ or some such BS – and stuff like this is the result.
    Evil and lunacy walk the earth. How they dress and why is irrelevant. The only way to deal with them is to defend against them and neutralize them before they hurt people. And unfortunately, our liberal society is hellbent on mainstreaming perversion and mental illness.

  33. So, we are denying that our human nature is complex; that we are both rational and emotional; that we function within both love and anger, compassion and jealousy; that we often cannot understand each other or even want to relate to each other. And we are instead speculating.
    Instead, we are searching for the mechanical cause of all our behaviour.
    Is it genetic? Let’s find the gene for, let’s see, being gay, or being drunk, or being angry, or..Remove the gene or drug the gene?
    Is it copycat behaviour from news reports? Is that a major cause of our actions? I think we’d need some evidence that all our actions are secondary to some other event we hear about. Remember how the media tried to pin the Gifford attack on Sarah Palin’s speeches?
    Is it the movies and video games? Let’s forbid music, games, snowball fights, hockey and western gunfight movies and, gosh, suddenly, everyone will be good to each other. Just like in the old days before movies and video games.
    Is it the politically correct education where we ae taught to never tease, never hit, care about each other’s multicultural differences..and gosh, we won’t ever huddle in isolate ethnic groups hating each other, taunting each other.
    Is it poverty, where we are told that all violence stems from poverty? So if the government provides billions in welfare and housing, that means that no gangs would ever exist, to run their own violent drug and theft economies?
    Life and people aren’t that simple; neither are mechanical systems that we can fully control.
    From what we are now hearing, this young man had Asperger’s syndrome, which is NOT, repeat NOT, aligned with violence. But, he was a ‘special needs’ child. required stability and could not handle changes, and had difficulty with new environments and interaction with new people. Apparently, his mother was attempting to, against his will, have him institutionalized.
    Was his violent reaction thus, a reaction of personal anger and fear at her attempt to put him into an institution? Does this have even one thing to do with guns, movies, videos, or genes? Was it just pure horror and fear?
    As for the media coverage of this event my concerns were the intrusion into the personal lives of the families and the young students. Asking a young child ‘how does this make you feel’ is unethical. And, the constant search for single causes: guns, videos etc.
    I think we cannot control everything and frankly, I wonder if any of the suggestions around guns, videos etc would have prevented this tragedy.
    Most certainly, if he hadn’t had access to a gun, that would have been the one means of control. But he could then, as in China, have used other means…

  34. Dave Grossman, one of the formost authorities on conditioning to kill and the psychological effects of combat (see his books “on killing” and “on combat”) argues persuasively that violent video games train killers (without the controls imposed by military training). Combine this with the breadth of psychological profiles in a populace, from sociopaths to plain bug-out nuts, and you have a guaranteed recipe for recurrent disasters.

  35. Tenebris, I’m not a fan of violent video games and violent rap music and so on, but I think that any attempt to make a direct link between them and an actual murder is tenuous. To say that they ‘train killers’ would be quite difficult to prove.
    After all, we could say the same about comic books and Disney cartoons, about folk tales, about even, Homer’s tales.
    A sociopath or paranoid schizophrenic, for example, is quite capable of violence without being ‘trained by a video game’. Equally, someone who, in the depths of an emotional rage, murders his girlfriend, need not have been ‘trained by a video game’.
    The link is too tenuous and the hope that IF we never hear or see violence, THEN we ourselves won’t be violent, is hard to prove.

  38. A long time ago the media stopped publicizing suicides and reporting them so that kids and unsteady people with problems don’t copy them so it’s NOT like this is a new idea.
    The media gets a ton of money when some loser freak POS does something like this. The media and the POS have a symbiotic relationship that preys on us. Just like algae and fungus combine to make lichen that can eat rock.
    After watching 5 minutes of Piers Morgan on this topic I don’t watch any of it anymore.

  39. Some commenters seem to think that this is just reaching for yet another thing to blame, but if you look at the work of the forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz on mass killings and all of the work on the “Werther Effect” in respect to suicides generally, it is quite clear that changes in reportage will greatly reduce the frequency of these sorts of incidents — as it has for subway suicides in Austria, product tampering with cyanide in the USA, etc., etc.

  40. richfisher, I refuse to watch Piers Morgan on any topic.
    Douglas2, mimicry is a basic factor of our ability to learn; that’s how we are socialized as children; that’s how we learn a language.
    I disagree that to prevent a specific ‘unwanted social behaviour’ that we must prevent any knowledge of its existence. We talk a lot about bullying and talk a lot about ‘good behaviour’. Has this been successful in stopping bullying?
    Suicide is not the norm; if it occurs I doubt if it can be linked as due only to another example. There would have to be, I think, deeper psychological issues within the individual.
    My concern about the media coverage of Newtown was the disgraceful political agenda of such as Obama and the anti-gun lobby; the utter ignorance of the difference between a neurological disorder and a mental illness; and the unethical soap opera intrusion of the media into the private grief of the people. They could have make this event public, with respect, grief and dignity, without any of the above.

  41. ET >
    “I think that any attempt to make a direct link between them and an actual murder is tenuous.”
    Yet something has changed in the American psychological collective to bring on such mass cultural violence since the mid sixties. It’s certainly was not because of “guns”, or a “gun culture”. Other gun culture societies do not suffer the same, and neither did the US prior to the 60’s.
    A fish rots from the head down, when your leaders can invade countries with impunity and level towns full of women and children without any empathy whatsoever your society is lost.
    American society has become a cruel society of mentally unstable drug addicts, porn addicts, violence addicts, debt addicts, material & status addicts – TV, music, games go hand in hand with the corrupt government bureaucracies to simply reflect and feed this psychopathic culture of cruel.
    Regardless there is a direct link somewhere. Probably a complex soup of causes and effects, but there is a reason that the worlds beacon of freedom and liberty has fallen into darkness to be sure.

  42. Knight99, you bring up some contrary bits of data.
    You define the US population in very broad terms as
    “a cruel society of mentally unstable drug addicts, porn addicts, violence addicts, debt addicts, material & status addicts – TV, music, games go hand in hand with the corrupt government bureaucracies to simply reflect and feed this psychopathic culture of cruel.”
    That’s quite the paintbrush. I disagree. The unreported actions of generosity and care, as found in support for charities in fund or in kind is still very large in the US. The generosity of individuals helping others in natural disasters continues such as in the Sandy Hurricane. The rise of the Tea Party with its focus on individual care and responsibility can’t be ignored.
    I’m not sure what you mean by a change since the mid-sixties. What are you suggesting took place? And your ‘invade countries with inpunity’. You can’t be referring to Iraq (which was a large coalition and agreed to by the UN); or Afghanistan, which was due to Bin Laden and the Taliban and 9/11. So, I’m unsure of your reference, unless it’s to Libya!
    From DrugFacts, Nationwide Trends, as of this month, illegal drug use has, according to the data, remained the same or gone down. Only marijuana has increased. Alcohol use has also declined. Same with ah, tobacco. So, the hard data doesn’t support your outline.
    The changes that I, on the other hand, am concerned about are economic and political.
    The US has moved into a socialist economic mode, increasingly centralized and increasing the size of the population dependent on government funding. It has, by its support of unions, drastically reduced its manufacturing capacity. That is, it has decimated its wealth producing capacity by destroying the private sector economy.
    It has, again, via unions, exponentially increased its public service bureaucracy.
    That is, the big change I see is the growth of the central government and the ratio of the population dependent on the taxpayer. Politically, it has set up Washington as an isolate unaccountable bubble, immersed in its own power and agendas and manipulating the electorate into identity blocs for its own power.
    This, by the way, has strong similarities to what Trudeau and Chretien did to Canada. We are only now, slowly, emerging from this economic infrastructure, but, the left is fighting this new strength of Canada each step of the way.
    None of these changes have ’caused’ the domestic or irrational acts of violence in the US or in Canada. I continue to consider that they are, in the majority, not within the control of the larger society but within some but not total control of the family and of the local community.

  44. ET >
    To suggest that the US as a whole is a more charitable and generous society towards each other since the sixties is a ridiculous assertion.
    Whether illegaldrugs has declined or increased slightly as of late is moot to my point. I don’t have credible specific data to agree or deny and you haven’t provided any. Regardless mainstream illegal drug usage is through the roof overall since the sixties. Yesterdays hard drugs such as heroine & crack are now mainstream drugs in many non traditional drug circles while homemade methamphetamines and designer drugs like Ecstasy are epidemic across the US.
    It’s disingenuous to say that drugs are not a sizable culture altering problem causing multiple billions in law enforcement, legal, incarceration and medical costs, overdoses, homicides, and suicides.
    Which is only one side of the drug coin, the other side are the legal psychotropic drugs, which should be the real focus of the spree killings, school shootings and such.
    http://www.ssristories.com/index.php?p=school
    There’s obviously no point in further debating your incessant defence of an American {aggressive humanitarian foreign policy}. And sorry, throwing the UN out at me as some talisman of legitimacy won’t change my opinion any more than yours.
    Let’s just agree that innocent deaths by “gun welding crazy man” pales astronomically in comparison to UN/ US “humanitarian causes”.
    Another interesting related read:
    http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/reading-between-the-headlines/201207/mass-murders-are-the-rise

  45. Knight99, I gave you the link about drugs. I didn’t post it as a link because the filter frequently and rather arbitrarily grabs such posts. But I gave you the name and ‘this year’, or 2012. You can get the hard data from that.
    Nor did I say that the US is a MORE charitable society since the sixties. I said it still IS and continues to be charitable because you painted such an absolute picture of an opposite society.
    I still don’t know which wars you are referring to, but I question your ‘invade countries with impunity’. You and I have a different view of the MENA and the role of the West in assisting their modernization. I think we’ll simply have to acknowledge each other’s differences and agree to disagree.
    I’m opposed to the UN; it does no good and a great deal of harm. My point about Iraq was only to explain that the US Iraq invasion wasn’t unilateral but included a broad international coalition and the support of the UN. For what it’s worth.

  46. Take another look at what Big Bad Jim wrote @ 8:19 am. I think this family breakdown explains a lot of where we are today and why.

  47. Lanza found out that his mother had started proceeding to have him committed, so he killed her for that out of angert, he was smart enough to know he was toast and would be committed. I could not understand why he chose a school with young kids , and then killed the very youngest, it was because his mother had in the past vonuteired at that school with that level of kids, he was mad that his mother had more consideration and love for those kids than for him, he was getting even with them and his own mother, even tho he had already killed her. As to shooting himself, if he hadn’t, he would have been committed, which sparked this in the first place.

  48. ET said: “I think we cannot control everything and frankly, I wonder if any of the suggestions around guns, videos etc would have prevented this tragedy.
    Most certainly, if he hadn’t had access to a gun, that would have been the one means of control. But he could then, as in China, have used other means…”
    Well, this is the question being asked, isn’t it? Is there any form of -centralized-,-government- control that can prevent randomly occurring shooting events? Is there any kind of psychological profiling or other technological method of spotting the potentially violent before the fact… that a government institution could use? Would a -government- ban on violent media help? A ban on guns? A ban on bullying? A ban on TV?
    Story on my blog just now is a woman in Florida walked into a mosque with a school attached to it today with a two foot long sword. Wandered around for a while, and the cops didn’t nail her until she was leaving. What’s the solution to that? Gun control?
    The answer quite obviously is -NO-, there is no method, policy or technology available to -government- that will stop this kind of thing. We are really NOT going to identify the triggering stimulus that made this kid do this thing at Sandy Hook. If we did, it wouldn’t help next time, because the next guy out there will be a -different guy-. Same as the cold, really. We don’t have a cure because the bugs mutate.
    But that doesn’t matter.
    Because the whole focus is on building the centralized command and control structure of government, not public safety. The entire media coverage we are witnessing is a coordinated event. They aren’t reporting news, they’re putting on a show that reinforces in your mind the importance of government.
    The -solution- to this problem of random attacks is not a centralized response. The solution is a -distributed- response. The solution is to have random citizens armed and more importantly empowered to respond to attacks. As in, whoever wants a gun goes out and buys one, and then carries it around with them. When a mass shooting goes down, one or two of those people are going to be there.
    Just as the body does not have a central organ that sends out antibiotic stuff on demand but rather has antibodies and T-cells -everywhere-, so society normally does the same thing. Gun free zones are not normal. They exist to protect centralized authority, not the people in the zone.
    That’s what will work. That’s not what is being discussed. A vast increase in the already vast powers of government, that’s what we,ve got on offer today. Sandy Hook is just the first convenient excuse that came along.
    Or, put another way, its an anti-human crusade being pushed by people who want to control everything. Including you. Oh, and they want to punish rednecks too. No reason, just cultural hate.
    So when you see a proposal for public policy, see if it increases central control or decreases it. That will tell you everything you need to know.

  49. Knight99, FYI, Psychology Today is a lefty propaganda rag. People who aren’t horrific liars and tools of the Democrat Party (like John Lott) have done the research, and mass shootings are no more frequent than they’ve ever been, nor have the body counts increased.
    That’s why all the BS about movies, video games and assault weapons is BS. Because if those things made any difference the numbers would go up. And they have -not- gone up. They are the same or slightly lower in right-to-carry states.
    Just consider a moment who benefits from giving government the power to censor movies, news, books, video games, TV or whatever. Government, duh.
    That’s why you’re seeing this crap in popular magazines all the time. Its a scam. Its the same scam as gun control and global warming, just from a different direction.

  50. The Phantom >
    Mabey so, but the paranoia levels are high regardless of the BS.
    Sometimes lefty rags put foot in mouth to help a cause.
    I have no doubts that drug & alcohol abuse along with pharmaceuticals and mental illness are the leading cause of violence of any kind in society. We all see it with our own eyes regardless of “studies” at some point in our lives, unless you live on the moon of course.
    My personal opinion about video games causing violence is not high. At the same time I don’t reject it out of hand. There’s weird crap going through people’s minds that I’ll never understand, we see that just blogging or reading the news everyday. Apearently people in China have been known to starve to death or die from sitting around playing games for days on end – what sh*t can compare with that?

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation