A Proposal, in re: the Sick and the Murderous.

Imagine if our press corps banded together on a new ethical principle: to make the perp of mass-killing crimes anonymous.

Pick an alias, a boring and bad one, and leave all the personal detail and glory out of it. Report the grossest most embarrassing personal problems you could unearth. Make it a general practice in the industry - I don't mean legislate, I mean adopt an ethical business principle. Didn't it used to be that victim's names of certain horrible crimes were not reported? Well - aren't these sick scumbag motherfuckers also victims, horrible victims of society? We can bend a point for the greater good, here, I think. We can get the media on board with the ethical journalistic need to stop heaping glory on the perpetrator's person, as they report fully on the story and all its other aspects.

We could at least try. Media coverage is a piece of this.

If we make it a practice and make it stick, that if you do that mess, if you go kill a bunch of people with a gun, or a homemade bomb, or a billowing cloud of some chemical agent, anyway you do it - the national/major news media isn't going to be trumpeting your name, or plastering your face, or dissecting your theories and opinions, but they are going to trumpet your full medical history and your permanent record from school, and what a loser you are, and how fucked up you were.

Now of course, your maverick amateur you tube journos and etc. can flout the ethic if they wish. You can't stop sick people on the margins from spreading what they wish. You can't stop sick people on the margins from being the free, unpaying audience to it. Seeking it out. But who's going to care in the mainstream? In the world in general, and in public acclaim?

You reduced yourself to a horrific act. What does it matter to us what your name was, and your face, and who you were? Your atrocious act did not make you significant. It only made significant the wish in others' minds to not be like you.

Or so it should be.

Our compassion and help to those who are in trouble and crisis will always be urgently needed, and well spent. But it's time for us to grow the fuck up, as a society, and get over this question: "What could make a person DO something like this?"

We already know what could - and what does. We also know that of all the factors that could and do "make" a person do the inexcusable, tons of people undergo those same factors and do not kill. It's time to stop fetishizing those who do.