Contagion

(The Atlantic; Getty)

Human beings use stories as a way to impose order on chaos, “to force a narrative onto the inconceivable,” my colleague Elliot Ackerman writes. “And what’s more inconceivable,” Elliot asks, “than slaughter, whether it arrives in the form of the Trojan War, the Holocaust, or the murder of 19 children by a teenage gunman in Uvalde, Texas?”

But for all the stories America tells about mass shootings, we don’t pay nearly enough attention to what our narratives are capable of, Elliot argues. “In Columbine and Sandy Hook, the bad guy sits at the center of the narrative. In Uvalde, we already know the name of the shooter … In a nation that worships celebrity (and infamy is a form of celebrity), the stories we tell ourselves about mass shootings contribute to the phenomenon.”

Elliot makes three key points about our mass-shooting stories and how we might change them.

• Media narratives can be contagious. Research has shown a measurable increase in the likelihood of a second mass shooting in the days after one occurs. “The next potential mass shooter is, right now, surely watching the coverage of Uvalde,” Elliot warns.
• Many mass shooters want notoriety. “The unmet desire on the part of many of these murderers to be at the center of a narrative, as opposed to on its periphery, is a unifying thread,” Elliot writes.
• France offers a different approach. After the July 2016 Bastille Day attacks in Nice, several French news organizations refused to reprint images from Islamic State propaganda or to publicize the name of the murderer, Elliot reports. Though some American newsrooms do this as well, “no American-media consensus exists on how to cover mass shooters. Is the French approach not worth considering?”

Further reading: Psychologists weigh in on the emotional costs of following the news about mass shootings. They are “the price we all pay to live in this kind of society,” one says.

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