Stop Making Them Famous

      Another horrific school shooting yesterday.  This time the shooter was a young woman (it's apparently more complicated than that) -- who otherwise fits the broad general pattern.  By now, you can go look up the individual's middle name. 

      We have to stop making these people famous.  I get it: tragedy occurs and we want to make it not have happened.  We can't, so we want to keep it from happening again.  Maybe we could if we knew more? And so we -- and the news media we tune into, and who make a living giving us what we want -- dig up more and more about the killer.  But the effect is to make terrible crimes a pathway to fame and that does not stop them at all.  It primes the next twisted personality who will commit the next crime.

      We have to stop.  There's plenty of loathing going around and this is a place where it can actually be put to good use: these crimes are loathsome.  Repugnant.  It's time we treated them that way.

     (Edited To Add: As more details come out -- yeah, I gave in to doomscrolling this morning -- this one's a major contribution to everyone's worst trope-of-the-moment, which will overshadow the very real way in which each of these crimes is enabled by the fuss and furor over the preceding ones.  If you want to stop it, stop the feedback that keeps on making more of it.  This crime and criminal is a giant can of worms that pundits on all sides will exploit, but it's also one more data point on the attention-seeking-shooter pyramid of failure.)