What to do about Las Vegas and other acts of carnage
What can we do about mass shootings?
Make the shooter disappear.
This means:
No news coverage. (The event, yes. The killer, no.)
No stories filed from the front lawn of the killer’s home.
No panels convened to speculate about “what made him do it.”
No experts consulted.
No documentaries allowed.
Killers need to know that murderous acts will guarantee their obscurity, that they will be removed from the human record.
This is our ‘capital punishment,’ so to speak. We extinguish your public persona. We remove any trace of you from memory.
My theory:
that murders imagine that their acts of carnage will make them “legendary.” In a celebrity-addled culture, the calculation for some crazy people is this: if you can’t have fame, you can at least have infamy.
As it stands, all the coverage of Stephen Paddock is, in a grotesque way, his reward. Worse than that, this coverage sends a signal to other crazy people who now stand on the verge of mass murder. “This is your ticket to immortality.”
In short: we are doing this absolutely the wrong way around. We are encouraging crazy people to do crazy things.
But there may be some movement, some change afoot.
Last night, on Charlie Rose, David Fincher said that, for his new show Mindhunter, he decided quite deliberately that this treatment of mass murderers would avoid the Silence of the Lambs treatment. No psychopath as “wily coyote, super genius.” No “gourmet, opera expert.”
Fincher says: “To me, these are very sad people who have grown up under horrendous circumstances.”
It’s a start.
