Hacker News Reader

Comment by williamle8300 | Hacker News Reader

I get the "sexinesss" of denying the person the attention they wanted, but it doesn't help society. We need to delve into the "whys" and "hows" of the shooter whenever stuff like this happens.

If we don't know the person's name, or the context of the person it makes us objectify the person, and as much as we would like to do so... it actually doesn't help us strengthen the collective wisdom of society to prevent this from happening again.

Say the person's name.

Get to know his family.

Get to know the years before they became radicalized.

Understand why they believed this was right as perverse as their rationale is. This is the only potent defense we have against terrorists and their ilk: Grow your mindfulness about the human condition.

View on HN

> I get the "sexinesss" of denying the person the attention they wanted, but it doesn't help society.

I think you have it totally backwards. If anything, it's "sexy" for news agencies to barf out everything they can know or speculate about the person. It lets them grab eyeballs, ratings, and fill airtime and pages.

In contrast, removing the "notoriety payoff" is the sober, serious, and "wise" approach for society. There's a huge correlation between media-obsession after a shooting-tragedy and another attack occurring soon afterwards. [0]

> We need to delve

No, "we", the media-consuming audience, emphatically do NOT need to do any delving. 99.9% of us will never have expertise, and even if we did would be unable to act upon it.

The people who do (sociologists, psychologists, etc.) are going to be able to get at the data anyway, they don't need to get their primary research from the 24-hour flashing-klaxon news-blast.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4&t=1m39s

Maybe you believe in the media distilling knowledge to us... I believe in the people fortifying and defending themselves with competence.

"Terrorism" is a rich field, and we shouldn't shy from its macabre quality. We have the right to overturn rocks, look underneath, and make our own determinations for what's actually happening.

> Maybe you believe in the media distilling knowledge to us...

What makes you say that? I literally just described their output with the word "barf". Granted, human vomit is definitely food on its way to being chemically simplified, but I don't think that's the connotation you had in mind.

> I believe in the people fortifying and defending themselves with competence.

Competence is good, but it does NOT come from a breathless 24/7 media obsession over a big scary "SHOOTERMAGEDDON" animated title and constant loops of gruesome footage, nor from the interspersed speculation over "hints" in facebook and twitter feeds.

In fact, forget the advertising, novelty-appeal, or emotional-appeal, it does something evne worse: It instills a FALSE sense of competence in the viewers. (Seriously, there are studies, look 'em up.)

I can't really parse out what your point is. So I'll just pull a quote, and forgive me if I'm being simplistic but I think this alone shows that you're undermining the intelligence of the private citizen.

> 99.9% of us will never have expertise

This is not about "the innate capacity of man" or any such romantic business. It's about:

1. Of the entire audience being catered-to, almost none of them will have the inclination/money/time to become meaningful experts in violent mass-shootings.

2. The kind of information crafted by the mass-media is too low-quality to assist anybody towards that goal anyway.

3. People who are interested or competent in the field will instead acquire their data through entirely different mechanisms anyway.

4. The mass-media coverage is actually counter-productive to the goal of competence. In the search for filler, it is increasingly likely to host terrible "experts" or to portray news-anchors as experts. Among viewers, it creates "armchair experts" after 5 minutes, instilling them with a false sense of competence.

5. Finally, the popular style of mass-media coverage harms society in general, through encouraging additional unstable individuals to act.

Nah man. You're a person... I'm a person. It's elementary. We can always understand, and it seems like you're insulting the intelligence of the public talking like you do.

Being informed is almost always better.

How is it useful for you, or anyone, to know the name and face of a mass killer? It's not like you can predict how likely it is someone will murder you based on how they look or what they're called.

The point is that media is making mass killers into celebrities and that encourages more sick (read depressed, lonely) people to perform acts like this.

Exactly, it should be the responsibility of the legal departments involved to delve into those people's lives. The media wants eyeballs on them, if you really get down to it.

I categorically disagree with this, for two reasons:

1) Multiple mass shooting perpetrators have cited publicity as a motive, and continue to express interest in things like media engagement and how many people they killed. The Port Arthur massacre springs to mind as a prime example.

2) The "hows" are pretty goddamn obvious. Guns and ready access to them are how! Port Arthur is another excellent highlight of why this is the case - John Howard's government instituted sweeping gun control measures after the incident. Australia had nearly a dozen shootings in the decade leading up to Port Arthur. Since the ban on automatic rifles and semiautomatic rifles/shotguns was put into place, only twelve people in total have been the victims of shootings since. Just that ban was enough to drop the aggregate number deaths due to gun crimes by an order of magnitude!

Well, just because they want publicity doesn't mean we shouldn't give them publicity. Give them publicity. I don't see the harm in that.

If a child says, "I want cake!" and you say, "No cake for you!" We're letting them determine the agenda.

Rather, we should do what makes us smarter. Knowing them makes us smarter.

As for the "how," it's not always about the tools they use (guns).

Sorry, I didn't articulate my first point well. The shooter in the Port Arthur massacre cited the school shooting in Dunblane, Scotland, as an inspiration for his crime. That happened the month before Port Arthur, and was heavily publicized in the month leading up to the Port Arthur shooting. The harm is that, by the admission of a mass shooter, the publicity surrounding another mass shooting inspired him to commit another one.

Ah, but it IS about the tools they use. That was my whole point regarding Australia's ban on automatic and semiautomatic rifles following Port Arthur. The ban on these types of weapons has correlated to a dramatic decline in mass shootings, because ready access to those types of weapons allows you to shoot lots of people at a high rate of speed. The after incident report of the Port Arthur shooting showed that the perpetrator killed almost a dozen people - a third of the death toll of the entire incident - within the first thirty seconds of the attack. Why? Because the shooter had a very accurate, high-rate-of-fire weapon carrying thirty or more rounds in a highly enclosed space. (Most of the people he shot were less than fifteen feet away.)

Now, would the incident have had the same death toll if the perp only had access to, say, a handgun? Possibly, but I doubt it. I know from my own experience with firearms that a rifle is substantially more accurate and holds way more ammo.

Australia's ban and reaction to this incident makes perfect sense to me, and two decades of empirical evidence seem to suggest their policy choice was absolutely the right one.

I'm sorry to be a wet blanket here. I know it's early and these are still alleged murderers but I feel no responsibility to "grow my mindfulness" with respect to the human condition of alleged murderers. Sometimes people are evil and do evil things and I can understand why good people get angry enough to disrespect the names of evil people.

Are you saying a "terrorist" is no longer a human being?

I am not sure how you would read that from my comment. But to answer your question, no they are still technically human.

But also I do not feel inclined or obligated to afford a terrorist a courtesy of understanding their motivation or point of view or grow my mindfulness. Murder is evil, terrorists are evil - is there more to understand in anyway other than purely academic?

One is naive to believe understanding the human condition of a murderer by getting to know their family or understanding them pre-radicalized will bring change or make an impact or stop the next one. No offense but in my opinion this is philosophical gibberish.

Gaining an understanding of your enemy's background, capabilities and motivations is not a 'courtesy'. Rather, such knowledge is needed to achieve victory.

"If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles."

You are making a fine point, but I think the spirit of your comment is quite different from the original from @williamle8300.

Your point a agree with on a big picture level, the war fighters and analysts and policy makers need to understand capabilities and motivation of the enemy. I'm not a war fighter and I don't believe it makes any sense for me or other Joe Average Citizen to empathize or understand a psychopathic foreign enemy. Understanding in this case won't get you far.

I think you can do this without providing a level of infamy too. That is, don't say their name, but also work to understand why this happened and work on solutions that help prevent this from happening in the future.

I don't understand your logic. Can you elaborate?

At this point I don't think people know why the Farook couple did what they did, but there are suspicious circumstances like their computer missing a hard drive and their cell phones broken.

Supposedly, these people were connected to those that the FBI were already investigating for terrorism threat, and if so, then there is even more cause for their names to be known, because we need to be able to non-ignorantly to discuss specific successes and failures of the FBI. That, and striking things from public discourse is very dangerous.

Why would you need any of this? These kinds of events are sad for the people involved, but probably not worth spending time trying to figure out, as they are exceedingly rare and not particularly dangerous compared to other more mundane ways to die and become injured.

to understand why it happened. why it wasn't prevented. and maybe.. one day.. to prevent it from happening again.

should we also whitewash all of history's tragedies?

Just as the fact that we die from cancer is something we don't accept and try to solve. So should we try to solve death by bullet.

"These kinds of events are sad for the people involved, but probably not worth spending time trying to figure out, as they are exceedingly rare."

These events aren't exceedingly rare. Quite the opposite. In fact, the San Bernadino shooting wasn't even the only mass shooting in the US on December 3rd. IIRC, there has been one mass shooting, on average, every day since the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012.

More info: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/03/458321777/...

Number of people killed this year by mass shootings, according to that article this year: 462

Car accident fatalities per year according to this article[1]: 30000 (500+ per week) .

Low end estimates of flu deaths per season [2]: 3000

These latter two are not anything you would worry about significantly (they are not particularly likely to kill you). Why should I care about being killed in a mass shooting?

[1] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit...

[2] http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/us_flu-related_deaths.h...

Yes, if the people and governments were less emotional, we could probably avoid lots of deaths. However, let's not forget this isn't a matter where you can have only one thing. Researchers can improve cancer tratament while mechanic, civil and traffic engineers can reduce accidents. I'm not sure who's more qualified to reduce shootings, but we should also look into that.

Understanding is hardly the "only" potent defense. There are better ways to prevent things like this from happening but they are also pretty unpalatable to modern society.

Holding families accountable for treason worked pretty well in feudal cultures. Same here. Put the onus of responsibility for prevention of tragedy on the family. Failure to report / take adequate measures is negligence.

Also I think you are making the mistake most engineers make about the mentally unwell: that they can be "fixed" if only they were "diagnosed" early enough.

Very little evidence this is the case. You can medicate someone to the point they don't care anymore but you can't really fix bugs in their programming.

I don't think society can rid of evil entirely. The best we can do is prepare ourselves (read: "guard"), and be able to respond with competence as a society.

True, some people shall/will not be "fixed" but that doesn't negate our duty to understand.

There has been a lot of understanding of their rationale. And many have concluded it is due to glorification of the killers before them.

> Get to know his family.

Problem is, the family could get in trouble, even if you are just a remote relative who had virtually no connection with the shooter for years.

Why would they get "in trouble?"

Imagine you are an employer. You find out that the person you were considering for hiring is a relative of the shooter. Fearing any risk, you decide not to go ahead with that person.

And for parents of murderers, it's not unheard of to get personal threats.

I don't think a competent employer would make that leap in logic.

And I'm not sure about families of killers getting death threats. In America, we have a pretty solid understanding of individuals, and individual's actions. Society generally just wants to move beyond the incident and somehow better ourselves. I'm not sure where you're getting that idea.

"Say the person's name."

The murderer's names are Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik

That's a start!

Hey look. A person's name can denote ethnicity. What a surprise. There's more information in a name than just what can bring a person infamy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com