About Mass Murderers

     Every time it happens, the same general coverage plays out: normal shock and horror at the horrific crime, and once the initial outrage begins to fade, everybody but everybody, from NPR to your uncle who shares loud opinions at every family gathering, from Fox News to gun-control organizations, starts trying to suss out the mind of the killer, often with an eye towards catching the next one before they go off the rails and usually grinding their own axes in the process.

     And they keep on saying the name of the killer, over and over.  Making them famous.

     You want to know the prime motivation of all of these murderers?  They want to be famous.  Many of them treat the stats on similar criminals as some kind of twisted leaderboard.  Sure, the nominally-religious ones say it's for their faith, the racist ones give racist justifications, the political ones claim its for some greater good or to silence their enemies, the seething nutjobs talk about striking back at whatever institution, authority or peer group they think wronged them, yadda-yadda yackety-yak, but it's blather.  They're looking to write their names across history like misbehaving boys peeing their names into fresh snow in their neighbor's front yard.

     Every single person doing a deep dive into the supposed mind of these criminals, "Whatever made Firstname Lastname commit their horrific crime?  We talk to the former yoga instructor of their neighbor across the alley and analyze their MySpace page from twenty years ago," is just feeding the next would-be mass killer: Look how much attention Firstname Lastname got!  Look at how many views their manifesto got!  Look how angry they made people!  They want to be just like Firstname Lastname, only more so -- and they don't mean the killer's religion, politics, or particular flavor of non-murderous nuttiness.  Nope.  It's the killing -- and the fame.  It's the attention.

     We have to stop stoking the flames of criminal celebrity.

     These crimes, striking though they are, are rare.  Over a hundred people die in traffic accidents in the U. S. every day and we scarcely blink.  One person kills two and injures nearly ten times as many, and it makes headlines and gets live special reports.  The overwhelming majority of people in this country didn't kill anyone; Sunday School teachers and the worst racists you can think of, hardcore Antifa people and the nice little old Republican ladies who work as pollwatchers every election didn't kill anyone or even plan to; nearly every Muslim, Evangelical Christian, agnostic and Sikh (etc.), along with just about all Republicans, Democrats, Greens and Whigs (etc.) didn't commit mass murder.  Even most insane people are, in fact, not murderers.  How lovely if we could point at some demographic group and say, "Yes, these people are the ones who commit mass murder," and stop them.  But that's not how it works.

     The most recent mass killer as I write this was apparently a member of a stigmatized group (and also a rabid fan of other mass murderers, from the available evidence).  That is being leveraged in ways that are, in fact, lies; lies that contribute nothing to finding and stopping mass killers and instead deflect attention elsewhere.

     The specific bent that these mass killers share is an intense desire for posthumous fame earned through terrible crimes.  That's as deep as it goes; politically, religiously, socially, they're all over the map, and while most are white males, there have been female, nonbinary and non-white mass shooters -- and all of them wanted to be known for their crimes.

     Deny them that attention.