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Sometime after he murdered two people in a university dormitory, but before he murdered thirty more in a classroom building, the Virginia Tech shooter mailed NBC News a carefully produced multimedia package that included a twenty-three-page written statement celebrating “martyrs like [the Columbine shooters],” twenty-eight video clips, and forty-three photos. The material had little investigative value, but NBC broadcast the videos anyway and published the shooter’s writings on MSNBC.com. After NBC first broadcast the tapes, all major broadcast and cable newscasts and channels followed suit, airing portions of the tapes. Newspapers and magazines then put the photos on front pages worldwide, just as the shooter had intended.
In 2015, five days after a gunman shot and killed two television journalists in Virginia and posted footage of the shootings on Facebook and Twitter, the man who went on to shoot and kill nine people at an Oregon community college posted the following message to his personal blog:
On an interesting note, I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. 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 your’re [sic] in the limelight.
The message is chilling in hindsight, in part because after his own attack, the Oregon shooter’s social media profiles started to go viral, especially a photo of him posing with a rifle on his Myspace page. The shooter handed papers and a flash drive to one victim, demanding they give it to the police, and left a series of inconsequential “clues” lying around his apartment, in what can only be described as a trolling attempt to bait the public into interrogating his actions, magnifying the attention paid to him and his deadly act.
We’ve been down this road before. Forty years ago, serial murder (the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender in separate events) exploded onto the scene. Horror stories of sadistic killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, who kept decapitated heads in his freezer, and John Wayne Gacy, who dressed as a birthday clown and stored bodies in his basement crawl space, tapped our fears and captured our imaginations like nothing else. The notorious BTK Killer studied other killers; he even sent letters, drawings, and poems to the news media, taunting the police.20
For the networks, serial killers were the gift that kept on giving. Ted Bundy participated in the first criminal trial to be televised nationally in the United States. Leslie Allen Williams had local Detroit media compete for an exclusive interview and the “privilege” of printing his twenty-four-page open letter to the public. David Berkowitz reveled in his own celebrity to the extent that the State of New York passed “Son of Sam” laws to prevent criminals from profiting from the publicity created by their crimes. After extrapolating from unsolved crime rates that there might be upward of five thousand serial murder victims every year—an erroneous statistic at best and an outright lie at worst—newscasters shaped the perception that serial killers were everywhere.21 And the FBI didn’t correct them, because the inflated serial killer threat funded its Behavioral Science Unit.
The term serial killer was coined only in 1981,22 but—spurred on by the media and law enforcement—copycats began killing in the name of fame. By 1989, there were about two hundred separate serial killers in operation across the United States. The media’s obsession with serial killers had created a minor snowball effect: People inspired by the violence reported by the media acted out violence in a similar pattern. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the number of active serial killers had halved. In the current decade, it has halved again, to fewer than fifty.23 As quickly as they came, the serial killers were gone.
Where did all the serial killers go? Perhaps the better question is where did they come from in the first place? The rise of the serial killer correlated with improvements in data collection and police record keeping, which made it easier to connect the dots between criminal cases, especially across state lines, and identify examples of serial murder. Eventually, smart policing, advances in DNA evidence and forensic science, the proliferation of security cameras, and even social media and cell phone location data made catching serial killers easier. Longer prison sentences and tighter use of parole also meant that serial killers who once had killed, gone to prison, and then were released to kill again were a thing of the past. Potential victims also became harder to target: We changed our behaviors and stopped hitchhiking to San Francisco or letting our children play outdoors unsupervised.
But another reason there are fewer serial murderers today than in the 1980s is because serial killing does not provide the same level of celebrity as it did in the past. It’s not that such killers have disappeared entirely—about fifty people are killed by serial killers every year in the United States, according to best estimates, comparable to the number killed by mass shooters. The big difference is serial killers just aren’t the sensation they used to be; none of the recent perpetrators have made national headlines. Serial killers tried to live in their infamy. Once the media stopped giving them what they wanted, their crimes moved from prime-time television to reruns of Forensic Files and episodes of Mindhunter, and some of the motivation for serial murder faded away.
Sadly, the same cannot be said about mass shootings. Thanks to continued media reporting, mass shootings have evolved into a sort of cultural “meme”—an idea or practice transmitted like a virus from person to person, often via the media, that takes on a life of its own as it propagates. The term meme, a neologism, is derived from the Greek word mimeme, meaning “something imitated,” and was first coined by the famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins defined memes as ideas that spread from brain to brain—a cultural analogue to genes that replicate and spread. The concept is mostly used now to describe funny or irreverent images that go viral online and then are altered to keep the joke or idea alive as it ricochets around the internet. But in a digital age, when attackers can upload their own words and deeds to social media rather than relying on TV to achieve notoriety, it has a darker connotation.
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There is a tragic and recent history of mass shooters producing their own clickbait for public consumption. During the 2017 attacks at Pulse, a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which killed forty-nine, the shooter checked Facebook and Twitter to make sure his massacre was going viral. It was. The extremist who killed fifty-one people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 even livestreamed his rampage to Facebook from a head-mounted GoPro camera. In the highly disturbing video, the gunman drives to the first mosque, walks inside, and shoots multiple people before leaving the scene in his car and narrating his journey to the next mosque. The video was taken down within twenty minutes by Facebook, but anything posted online leaves a digital fingerprint, so versions of it stayed online for a worrying amount of time. Within twenty-four hours, Facebook banned 1.5 million versions of the video footage—1.2 million of which the company stopped from being uploaded at all.24 But one copy of the video lingered on its platform for six hours, and another on YouTube for three.25 The quick and seemingly unstoppable spread of this video typifies how social media has changed mass shootings: They now go viral and are viewed unedited.
There is something uniquely modern about the quest for celebrity status. The adage that “there is no such thing as bad publicity” has long been part of the American cultural landscape, but we now live in a society in which self-promotion is constant. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are powered by a framework that encourages, rewards, and creates performance. They are driven in large part by spectacle, and they have, in turn, made it much easier for someone both to create the spectacle of gruesome violence and to distribute it widely by themselves.
Mass shootings made for social media are a form of what criminologist Ray Surette calls violent “performance cri
me.”26 That is, the posting and video streaming are integral to the violence itself; they’re not incidental to the crime or some horrible personal trophy for the perpetrator to relive later. Performance crime is predicated on a kind of exhibitionism and desire to be publicly identified as the performer of the violence.27 Its perpetrators are inspired by the attention that will inevitably result from the online archive they create leading up to and during the event. Mass shooters are unique only in that they don’t want to live in the glory of their newly achieved social status and visibility. They want notoriety, to become legends in their deaths.28
Among young people especially, becoming famous (that is, as measured by the number of likes and followers on Instagram and Twitter) and being imitated (as on Tik Tok) is considered the ultimate form of success. One 2011 study found that a desire for fame solely for the sake of being famous was the most popular future goal among American preadolescents, overshadowing hopes for financial success, achievement, or a sense of community.29 A recent survey found that one-fourth of Millennials would quit their jobs to become famous. One in twelve would detach themselves from their families for fame. One in ten would rather be famous than go to college.30
The desire to be seen or valued is often the biggest perceived appeal of fame. A mass shooting is certainly an extreme means of pursuing it. However, according to our data, the past decade has seen a rise in shootings motivated by fame-seeking, and the idolization of fame drives nearly one in ten of all mass shooters (see table). When news organizations report casualty figures in boldface, or index the deadliest mass shooters in video game–style scoreboards, they tempt angry, anonymous, and alienated men with the tantalizing promise of infamy and immortality—especially if the body count is high enough. After all, bigger body counts mean bigger headlines. One 2016 study found that mass killers who expressed a celebrity-seeking motive killed twice as many people as those who did not.31 One recently thwarted mass shooter posted online that “a good 100 kills would be nice.” Another wanted to “break a world record.” This suggests that fame-seeking could foster one-upmanship among shooters.
The motivations of mass shooters
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It was every parent’s worst nightmare. On July 20, 2012, Tom Teves’s phone rang in the middle of the night. It was his son’s girlfriend, Amanda. She was hysterical.
“There’s been a shooting,” she said through sobs. “They dragged me out of the theater . . . I wanted to stay . . .”
“Are you okay?” Tom asked.
“Yes, Alex saved me.”
“Where’s Alex?”
“I don’t know. We can’t find him. They dragged me out of the theater. They made me leave. . . . He was shot. I tried to wake him up, but I couldn’t wake him up, he wouldn’t get up.”
“I knew then he was gone,” Tom tells us as he relives the moment over breakfast in the family home. Tom Teves’s story is well-known. He has shared it in a powerful TEDx Talk that has racked well over a million views.32 His son Alex was killed along with eleven other people at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. In the twilight hours, Tom called all the local hospitals, to no avail. Then he did what most people would do and turned on the television in search of answers. The shooting was breaking news. But instead of details about his son’s whereabouts, all Tom kept hearing was the name of the shooter—again and again and again. And then, after flying home from where he and his wife, Caren, were on vacation in Hawaii, all they saw on the front page of every newspaper was “that image.”
“That image” was the now-infamous mugshot of the shooter released by the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado. The mop of hair dyed red. The eerie, blank stare into the camera.
“All we could see was him. There was no mention of Alex, but we counted, and in one article they had the shooter’s name forty-one times in six paragraphs.” To make matters worse, a rumor began in the hours after the shooting that the shooter had actually referred to himself as “the Joker.” Speaking at a press conference in Manhattan, then New York police commissioner Ray Kelly said that the shooter “had his hair painted red, he said he was ‘the Joker,’ obviously the ‘enemy’ of Batman.”
The shooter never actually said this. But like the myths associated with the Columbine shooting, the idea that the shooter had fashioned himself after a comic book villain, the “Clown Prince of Crime” no less, spread like wildfire and remains one of the most persistent “zombie ideas” (falsehoods that should have been killed by contrary evidence) associated with any mass shooting in recent memory.33
The more the rumor spread, the more the “media was acting like PR for the shooter,” Tom Teves said. It was then that he and Caren decided to channel their grief into action.
To honor their son, the Teveses initiated the No Notoriety campaign, introduced in the opening chapter of this book. It’s not a blanket ban on reporting. The No Notoriety protocol asks the media to minimize use of a perpetrator’s name, especially in headlines, to a few constrained circumstances and to avoid gratuitous details about the killer’s biography and belief system—“Don’t Name Them, Don’t Show Them, but Report Everything Else,” as the title of one academic article explains.34 Still, critics argue that No Notoriety undermines “the public’s right to know” and to be fully informed about critical incidents. At the extreme end, they say No Notoriety is a call to limit First Amendment protections. Absent every last detail, they say, researchers can’t profile mass shooters and make sound policy suggestions.
We’d be lying if we said we could have built the Violence Project Database without all the media reporting on mass shooters. We learned where shooters got their weapons, how they planned their attacks, and how the police responded. However, a lot of what was published had no research value whatsoever, such as shooters’ yearbook photos and favorite vacation spots.
Take, for example, reporting on the 2017 Las Vegas shooter, which highlighted “his enjoyment of karaoke, his favorite casino games, and even what he ordered from room service prior to the shooting.”35 These excessive, irrelevant details have no bearing on the shooter’s motivation or inspiration, which by our calculation was experiential and, ironically, fame-seeking.
No Notoriety implores the media to report on the perpetrator with dispassionate language and to show them in the most unflattering light possible, perhaps on an autopsy table or incarcerated. And never to print the full text or video of a mass shooter’s propaganda or “manifesto” when a simple summary will do. Better still, don’t characterize their ugly rants and justifications for murder as a “manifesto,” because the term implies it deserves to be read. Instead, the word should be reserved, as intended, for characterizing an important political statement crafted by a public official or a person of prominence. The media should similarly avoid reposting posed photographs or action shots that might be seen as glorifying the killer. Instead, they should report responsibly and use any photos sparingly.
These guidelines are similar to existing policies against showing fans who run out on fields during televised sporting events or publishing the names of juvenile offenders and sexual assault victims. “It’s like a kid throwing a tantrum,” Tom explains. “Don’t give them negative attention.” They are also consistent with best practices for media reporting on suicide: The American Foundation to Prevent Suicide and the World Health Organization both caution the media to avoid sensationalizing or normalizing suicide and to avoid an explicit description of the method used or of photographs or videos that might inspire copycats. They’ve called for the inclusion of protective factors, like helplines and information on how to get help for suicidal impulses, when publishing stories on such events.
Despite some pushback from media professionals, Tom adds, “reporters start to get it when you ask them if they can name any of the victims.” The point here is that while many mass shooters are now household names, shooting victims, by comparison, remain anonymous. No Notoriety seeks to sh
ine a spotlight on the real heroes: the victims and survivors, communities and first responders. Place emphasis on the effect of the crimes on the victims and their loved ones. Focus on stories of bravery, strength, and resiliency instead of reveling in scenes of carnage and chaos.
“News media local to where these events happened, they get it,” Caren Teves says, because they’re living it, too. It’s the national outlets, who are detached from the tragedy, who need constant reminding.
One of the barriers to adoption of the No Notoriety protocol lies in the economics of news media. Media put information out there in part to put a face and a name to a crime, but mostly to increase views . . . and clicks. That’s because the media are in the competitive business of human attention and engagement. More engagement means higher ratings and market share, greater page views and unique visitors, all key performance indicators that attract advertisers and keep shareholders happy. And media outlets know that the spectacular, the stirring, and the controversial keep people watching. There is something especially captivating about violence. “If it bleeds, it leads,” said journalist Eric Pooley in his 1989 critique of mass media sensationalism. Hence the drip feed of information, the crawl, or scrolling headline ticker that appears at the bottom of the TV screen, communicating BREAKING NEWS to keep us watching.
Free expression is necessary for a peaceful society, but when we create spectacles out of tragic situations, we inadvertently signal that mass murder is an effective means of communication. We the public have the power to change this. “It doesn’t take an act of Congress; it takes an act of conscience,” Caren explains. We just have to “hit them in the wallet.”
The Violence Project Page 13