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A6 U.S. NEWS
Tuesday 3 sepTember 2019
Not so easy to prevent the spread of mass shooters’ names

By LISA MARIE PANE shooter there killed 51 peo-
Associated Press ple at two mosques, Prime
When law enforcement au- Minister Jacinda Ardern
thorities gathered to discuss refused to mention the per-
details of a mass shooting petrator’s name at all.
in West Texas that left sev- FBI leaders, leery of inspiring
en people dead, there was copycat killers and hesitant
one bit of information they to give them what they see
refused to provide on live as undue attention, have
television: the name of the occasionally been reluc-
gunman. tant in recent years to refer
Instead, they decided to to them by name.
release the name through Former FBI Director James
a Facebook post. Comey expressed that
Odessa Police Chief Mi- concern in a briefing with
chael Gerke made it plain reporters the day after a
why he wouldn’t mention 2016 rampage at an Orlan-
the name at the news con- do nightclub, repeatedly
ference: “I’m not going to referring to the gunman
give him any notoriety for not by his name but simply
what he did.” as “the killer.”
Even with such restraint, it FBI special agent Christo-
remained a challenge to pher Combs, who previous-
curb the spread of the gun- Odessa Police Chief Michael Gerke announces that he does not want to speak the name of the ly worked at FBI headquar-
man’s name. shooter from Saturday’s shooting during a news conference, Sunday, Sept. 1, 2019, in Odessa, ters leading the bureau’s
The Odessa Police Depart- Texas. Instead, the department released the name of the gunman through a Facebook post. efforts to respond to mass
ment has fewer than 25,000 Associated Press shootings, has held to that
followers of its Facebook on both sides of the gun de- “Ultimately, the police de- has studied the influence view. As the top FBI official
page, but the social media bate also began spreading partment can only directly of media coverage on fu- in San Antonio, he has over-
platform easily reaches mil- the word, spewing a fire- control what they do, and ture shooters. seen the bureau’s response
lions of Facebook’s mem- hose of information about that name, that informa- He and others appeal to to multiple mass shootings
bers around the globe and the suspect. tion can be reposted and the media to limit the vol- in Texas, including a 2017
the post was shared hun- In this era of a saturation of retweeted and republished ume of information about massacre at a church in
dreds of times. Within min- social media and around- hundreds of thousands of these perpetrators, saying Sutherland Springs that
utes, Twitter lit up with posts the-clock news, it’s next to time,” said Adam Lank- it does little to understand killed more than two dozen
mentioning his name. impossible to keep a lid on ford, a criminologist at the the reasons for the violence people.
Journalists and advocates such information. University of Alabama who or stop it in the future. At a news conference after
The Associated Press the shooting where officials
names suspects identified refrained from naming the
by law enforcement in ma- gunman, Combs said, “We
jor crimes. don’t talk about the shoot-
However, in cases in which er.”
the crime is carried out And in a television interview
seeking publicity, the AP after the shooting, Combs
strives to restrict the men- said he understood that
tion of the name to the the media had to name a
minimum needed to inform shooter “once,” but “after
the public, while avoid- that, we certainly don’t
ing descriptions that might want to draw any type of
serve a criminal’s desire positive attention to the
for publicity or self-glorifi- shooter. And we have
cation. The “No Notoriety” found through studies that
movement was partly in- there are people out there
spired by the 1999 Col- that are troubled, and
umbine school shooting when they see that, they
outside Denver. The gun- believe this is how I can
men became household show the wrongdoings that
names and even in death have been done to me.”
appeared to motivate a All these years later, the
whole new crop of mass Columbine attack con-
shooters. tinues to motivate mass
In in recent years, it has shooters, including two
gained momentum amid a men who this year stormed
seemingly steady stream of their former school in Brazil,
mass shootings. killing seven people.
The idea is to urge news or- The gunman in New Zea-
ganizations to refrain from land was said to have
naming the shooters in been inspired by the man
mass slayings and to curb who in 2015 killed nine
the volume of biographical black worshippers at a
information about them. In church in Charleston, South
New Zealand, after a mass Carolina.q