If you want these publicity-seeking monsters to stop doing what they’re doing, stop rewarding them.
I won’t say his name. I won’t say his name because that’s what the 23-year-old monster who opened fire on innocent children at Annunciation Catholic Church during a Mass in Minneapolis on Wednesday wanted.
I won’t say his name because his final gasp—his suicidal wish—was to take the life or do bodily harm to as many helpless, innocent children as possible before taking his own. Or have the police take it for him.
I won’t say his name—either of his names—even as some members of the media grapple with the gender identity of this monster. I won’t say his old name, or his new one.
Much will be written trying to comprehend why this hate-filled monster did what he did. But it won’t help. The nature of the evil that brought darkness and death into that Catholic church this week is unexplainable.
Changing our gun laws won’t stop this kind of evil from darkening our public places and sacred spaces, and tightening up our mental health laws won’t either.
But has anyone at the highest ranks of media and journalism pondered the notion that what these deranged monsters want is to leave this Earth in a blaze of glory, with the world focused on them? With the media itself a collaborator?
The words of the 26-year-old monster who murdered nine people before taking his own life at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College in 2015 revealed a disturbing trend in America: mass-shooter suicides. Suicides that would have never been national stories without a body count.
Here’s what he posted about another deranged gunman—the man who took the lives of two journalists in Roanoke, Virginia—before his shooting spree:
«A man who was known by no one is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.»
The post was removed. The killer’s words, his motivation and intention, still haunt. And still kill.
