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How news media can help prevent shooting massacres

By Chris Allen - posted Thursday, 20 December 2012


One voice kept at the public as most of Australia returned to productive issues, having crushed the shooters. Lee Rhiannon had grabbed hold of the fact that handguns, far more tightly controlled than long guns ever were, were still available if you jumped through the many hoops to get a license. Sympathetic journalists in a national broadcaster gave her a platform to claim, falsely, that handguns were easy to get. This led many to go through the tedious process to get legal guns, which filters out almost all irresponsibles. One foreign student took her advice, and although he was a bit weird a shooting club supported him; anecdotal evidence suggests that was partly out of fear of being accused of racism.

In late 2002 the media went nuts over the Washington sniper killings. Weeks of media hysteria over guns combined with this student's mental illness and personal crises. At the height of the Washington Beltway sniper headlines, he shot seven people at Monash University. A similar pattern had been followed; the news media with activist partners write stories about guns being easy to get, and so more people get them; then news media provide massacres as potent examples and publicity rewards to people who go on to kill.

Now killers send publicity packages with photos, video and manifestos to media directly, and news editors confirm their complicity in the killings by using those publicity pictures and stories.

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The tools to break the cycle of killings already exist, in the guidelines used to stop copycat suicides. When you break them, as NineMSN did for the jumping suicide of a pretty newsreader, the chain of imitations can lead far and wide. Within 24 hours a woman jumped from a building in West Perth, killing her child; later a woman jumped from West Gate Bridge, killing her children too; later still a man threw his daughter to her death from that bridge, but stopped short and spared the lives of his other children.

For massacres, called parasuicide events, the guidelines are clear and likely to be effective. They are:

· Move massacre and suicide stories to lower prominence. Below the fold, further back, later in the bulletin, fewer words, without longwinded or detailed special reports.

· Do not glamorise or demonise the actions of the perpetrators. Use the passive voice to make them less interesting.

· Do not provide glamorous people as action models; do not use pictures that the perpetrator provides. Choose pictures that diminish rather than glorify their self-image.

· Do not use words that might encourage people to think their own life patterns are similar to those of the perpetrators; emphasize the uniqueness of mental illnesses and situations of individuals.

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· Provide counter-suicide behavior guides, such as a hotline to call or quotes from groups that work with people at risk.

· Do not emphasize the tools and methods of suicides or mass killings.

And one more that is badly needed for media and police:

· Don't teach passive compliance as though the killer might not hurt you if you do what they want, or as though the authorities will be in time to help you. Teach people how to seize the initiative to save lives.

Until our media adopt guidelines like these, copycat mass killings will continue.

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About the Author

Chris Allen is an independent consultant geologist living in Perth, married with four grown children. He has an Honours degree in Science and an MBA and is a Member of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists. His interests include politics and media, volunteering; Toastmasters; windsurfing and antique guns. He is a Wikipedia editor on ‘Gun politics in Australia’ and debunks conspiracy theories and creationism in between.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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