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Comment by bhawks | Hacker News Reader

Based on the linked report it is clear that these disturbed individuals see commiting mass killings as a way of getting society in general, their families or objects of obsession to listen to their grievances. (Desire for fame, parting messages/videos for families and others).

If we reported on these incidents with a similar approach to suicides (minimal focus on the individual, no discussion of motivations, offering of therapy and support services) there would be a general decline in these tragedies. The tabloid sensationalism and Internet arm chair detectives are giving these sad people the platform they're looking for with disastrous results.

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We need to stop national reporting on this things. Treat them as local news.

I know some news outlets flat out refuse to print the names. That's a start.

It's kind of sickening how mass shootings in particular are so popular among the media these days. For example, the odds are that gun of yours will be used against yourself by yourself versus in self defense. For women in abusive relationships, they are 5x more likely to be murdered if their partner has access to a gun. Gun owners who carry their weapon are also 3x more likely to have that weapon stolen from them. There are plenty of ways to highlight the risks of gun violence in much more realistic and statistically likely terms for most people, than covering comparatively far rarer mass shootings in ways that invite copycat killers to try and have a platform.

> There are plenty of ways to highlight the risks of gun violence in much more realistic and statistically likely terms for most people,

You seem to imply the objective of reporting about mass attacks should be to inform us about the risks of gun ownership…? My takeaway from reports about details of mass shootings is gun control ideations promote an illusion of safety at the expense of actual safety.

Would you argue on the basis of the risk multipliers you glibly assert that it is beneficial to society for victims to be defenseless in the face of an actual attack rather than experiencing your cited risks in the course of everyday life?

My thesis is that these stories are gripping for people. They truly are, I saw people reposting the monterey park vigil on their social media around the country. This of course makes for good TV, and fills the room at the expense of covering other perhaps more directly relevant concerns that people should be up in arms about (such as corruption and abuse of office, climate change, and our inability to seriously address either due to how these things are connected). And of course when you have one side of the aisle wanting one thing and the other wanting the direct opposite, people will be emboldened to argue various ways in person and online about these issues, and perpetuate even more interest into looking at related media.

But I can't leave the other half of your point hanging either. The guy who stopped the monterey park shooter was unarmed. Honestly though, the whole 'good guy with a gun' narrative is rooted in fantasy. Over the past 20 years of mass shootings in this country, a good guy with a gun has stopped a bad guy with a gun 3% of times. It's also happened before where in the chaos and confusion, that good guy ends up shot by police.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/22/us/shootings-...

But in either case, the odds of one of being a victim in a mass shooting with a shooter you don't personally know are so low. In terms of gun deaths, you are far more likely to die via suicide or from someone you intimately know (1). Of the deaths via murder, both in terms of mass shootings where 4 people are killed at once (making up 1% of gun deaths a year), and in general, a little over half of all homicides are from intimate partner violence (2,3). So if you think "well a good guy with a gun only stopped a bad guy with a gun so few times because not every good guy has a gun," think again and consider how many more deaths from both suicide or intimate partner violence there would be with more access to guns among the population, along with the police shooting the good guy. Even with the current amount of guns there are in circulation, its estimated that 380,000 are stolen a year (4), and with more ownership that number is sure to increase. That same source also suggests you are 3x more likely to have a gun stolen while carrying.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-da...

2. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6628a1.htm

3. https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40...

4. https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40...

a lot of what you’re citing seems disingenuous at best. I wasn’t going to respond because the platoon downvoting discourages further discussion, but some brave souls upvoted so I feel encouraged. You also didn’t directly address my actual points, but what you came up with is rather ludicrous and I’ll just point out a few more obvious absurdities.

For example the "3x more likely to have a gun stolen while carrying” actually isn’t a result from the source, in fact the source clearly states "we know almost nothing about the actual event” with respect to the actual theft. Perhaps you’re trying to assert “must possess firearm for it to be stolen?"

How can you legitimately assert that “good guy with a gun” is a fantasy when your own numbers show it’s a reality? 3% is non-zero! Even the police occasionally use firearms to stop bad guys, yet I’m sure a majority of police never use their firearms in the line of duty.

Do you also discount lives saved? Can you even quantify them? None of your sources seem to give a damn about it! Just last year an ordinary guy out at the mall stopped a spree killer ambush in a crowded food court. Your analysis would conclude not allowing concealed carry because of the risk of suicide is greater than the risk of spree-killing per person-mall-visit (probably true) despite the fact they are not equivalent for comparison. Thusly spree-killers should be (absurdly) unimpeded, because they are uncommon. Similarly we shouldn’t bother wearing seatbelts, because it is mostly unnecessary...?

My opinion is your apparent gun control ideation is mostly founded in nutty false equivalencies and I consider these hazardous to public and personal safety as a basis for law.

Doubt. Individuals feel assaulted by society independent of reporting.

True but what has allowed it to become "an option" for these people? It's pronounced in the US, but mass violence (not just shootings, but bombings, knivings, mass vehicular assaults, etc) has increased beyond population growth, I think?

There have always been individuals who feel assaulted by society; what has changed to make these attacks more frequent?

(If they are becoming more frequent; I definitely hear about them more frequently but it may be an illusion, someone tell me if I'm wrong.)

If they just wanted to do as much damage on the way out as possible they wouldn't be spending so much effort on manifestos, video messages, letters and so on. They wouldn't care about becoming famous. Read the report - there is a huge focus on planning. These individuals see this as a way of being heard and sending a message.

The way we talk about these incidents play right into the delusional fantasies of future perpetrators.

Yeah but then people would cry about censorship.

It's not censorship, you can still run a story. I think the issue is the overall fixation, or how much the airwaves are dominated by these stories at the expense of all the other significant things occurring in our world. Consider how much ink is spilled over a mass shooter who isn't a gang member compared to one who is, for example. Gang violence is something that I see pretty much solely relegated to local news, maybe an article or two, and that's that. This shows the media, especially the national media, is incentivized to fixate on certain stories for some reason versus others. Maybe they attract more viewership and therefore ad dollars to the network. Maybe their posts see more engagement online when they are about a school shooting in a nice neighborhood over what people imagine to be routine in bad neighborhoods. It's all a bit perverse and sickening when you spend any time considering all of this.

I can't stop linking this very relevant topic in HN comments it seems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

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