Sandy Hook: wrong priorities


Sandy Hook’s students are back in school, Clackamas Town Center reopened within the week, and the man responsible for the Aurora shootings is on trial. America seems to be recovering and moving on from last year’s mass shootings, but we still don’t seem to be learning from them.



We know the names, the home lives and the various disorders of all of the shooters from the past 30 years. We’ve seen their faces dozens of times and their motivations and influences have been picked apart and overanalyzed ad nauseam. What about their victims?



We see candlelight vigils, crying parents and empty schools, but we rarely hear the victims’ names or learn anything about their lives. And this happens time after time. Big news stations and papers never pick up anything about the people who were killed.

It’s not because there are too many people, either. The New York Times published “Portraits of Grief,” a collection of one-paragraph biographies for those who died in the 9/11 attacks, and it took them less than two months to finish.

They wrote a paragraph for every one of almost 2,000 people. There’s no reason something similar couldn’t be done for the victims of the much smaller-scale events like Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook.

It doesn’t happen, though, at least not on a national level.



Instead we end up glamorizing the shooters. Wikipedia lists the weapons used in the shootings; shooters’ manifestos and writings get published and aired, and there’s all kinds of evidence that provides inspirations for people who would take after them.

The Virginia Tech shooter referenced the Columbine shooters by name in the documents he sent to NBC. The prevalence of mass shootings can’t be blamed on gun control or lack of mental health reform. It comes down to the way it’s reported. We end up romanticizing shooters when we pay so much attention to them and so little to the lives they destroyed.



Then we further trivialize the people they affected by politicizing their deaths. I’ve heard more about gun control in the last month than I have in the last 19 years I’ve been alive. That’s okay to an extent; something obviously needs to change.

But when the murders of 20 children become a talking point or an excuse for people to scream at each other on TV, it takes the meaning away from everything that happened.



It might sound heartless, but we should be doing our best to forget the names of the shooters. Giving them
notoriety only increases the likelihood of similar things happening. Instead of these huge exposes on their home lives, childhoods and experiences at school, or those painfully sad and uncomfortable interviews with their families, just let it be. Move on to remembering the victims, honor their lives and let their families talk about them.

On that subject, why air interviews with the shooter’s family at all? No one wants to go on national television to talk about why their son shot up a school. They have to be filled with such an awful mixture of grief, guilt and anger that I’m surprised they function as well as they do.

Seeing a red-eyed mother talking about how hard it was to connect with her son, or how shocked she is at what happened, isn’t really what America needs or wants to see.

A lot of the blame has to go on the people watching the news, rather than the people creating it, I guess. I personally avoided news sites as much as I could after initially hearing about the Sandy Hook tragedy, and when Facebook and Reddit started flooding with articles, I avoided them, too.

After I know the basic details, I don’t want to hear about it anymore. It’s depressing, and you’re more or less subjected to a rehash of the same information over and over again. But people eat it up. Ratings soar, articles are suddenly getting thousands of page views and shares, and everyone is talking about it. The media fulfills the same role they’ve been successful at fulfilling time after time.



The fact that human nature is terrible and drawn to tragedies doesn’t mean it should be catered to. The way these types of events are reported is so much more harmful and degrading than it should be. It’s worth making a change because that change just might be the thing that makes them less common.