Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/31/breaking-reports-of-mass-shoo.html
Multiple injuries in shooting at a municipal center in Virginia Beach, police say; shooter in custody.
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Nothing will change. Fuck that guy. Let’s please not be forced to learn his name. Let him go away in obscurity.
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Courthouse? Are the schools on summer break already?
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Another terrorist attack. We are at war.
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Can someone explain to me why we don’t call these terrorist attacks or murder/killing sprees or something? The language of shooting violence insulates us from the horror of the event.
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Shortsighted journalist standards pretend that awkward, uncommon, neutral phrasing is “fair” and will prevent them from being accused of bias. But it just prevents them from being more articulate half the time.
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Two reasons:
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It’s usually a white male doing the shooting.
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The perpetrator has usually availed himself of America’s unusually easy access to powerful firearms.
Any major corporate media outlet that regularly characterised them as terrorists would likely be boycotted and hounded by at least 25% of their audience, many of them white male defenders of their Second Amendment rights as defined by DC vs. Heller.
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Useful information, from WNYC’s On the Media
Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook, Active Shooter Edition (1 Aug 2014)
- In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong.
- Don’t trust anonymous sources.
- Don’t trust stories that cite another news outlet as the source of the information.
- There’s almost never a second shooter.
- Pay attention to the language the media uses.
- “We are getting reports”… could mean anything.
- “We are seeking confirmation”… means they don’t have it
- “[News outlet] has learned”… means it has a scoop or is going out on a limb.
- Look for news outlets close to the incident.
- Compare multiple sources.
- Big news brings out the fakers. And [image manipulators].
- Beware reflexive [social media sharing]. Some of this is on you.
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And it will be a guy. Always.
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Cue the inevitable conservative parade of useless thoughts and prayers.
Our society needs to find a more normal way of dealing with rage than shooting random innocent people
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Heading towards the exit, everybody stay safe and have a relaxing weekend.
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Hey now, let’s not exaggerate! A whole 3% of mass shootings involve a woman! Sure, almost always with a man, but there have been lone female shooters, such as with the Youtube attack and, um… one other case. Two technically is plural…
Okay, yeah, it’s always* a man.
*(except in a statistically insignificant number of cases)
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as a non-conservative, i offer only thoughts.
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Because they aren’t terrorist attacks. Terrorist, despite increasingly common usage, doesn’t just mean ‘really bad person.’ It implies the use of violence to effect political results through terror or, on occasion, direct destruction of something/someone hated. This is why McVeigh is called a terrorist, for instance.
Killing spree, however, is a reasonable name for it, and I have heard it used, though mostly for cases where it is a prolonged series of murderous incidents. A ‘mass murder’ as committed by ‘mass murderers’ seems the best solution for both precision and suitable affect.
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Thoughts and prayers are all they will get. If Sandy Hook didn’t lead to anything meaningful, nothing will. None of the mass shootings since have hit me as hard. None of them lead to anything either. At what point do we just concede that we sold our humanity to the gun lobby?
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Here’s the news, shooter kills. No interpretation required.
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Are they not often terror acts? There are political goals behind the incel acts. There was a political goal behind the gay nightclub shooting. Is there really that much space between strapping on a suicide vest and taking the armory down to city hall?
Words matter and I think that not reserving the word terrorist to acts committed by a brown person would be healthy.
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on a positive note, if there could be any, at least the NRA is appears about to implode, which should leave a void for at least a short time when there is disorganization and confusion on the gun nuts side. And without the flow of dollars to politicians, there may finally be the will to exert some control on the distribution and acquisition of guns.
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