Celebrity Killers

Seth Liebsohn and Victor Davis Hanson have both written articles on the same theme: let's ignore these mass murderers, and remember their victims. Instead, the media fights to get the most coverage, and the most endless coverage, on the news and in the papers, and it's just unseemly. It also inspires copycats, who revel in the publicity.Here's Liebsohn:

"But can we please stop with the ubiquitous pictures of him, and, indeed, the use of his name?
He should not be glamorized or given any kind of proper-noun attention at all. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the first and most important reason is to discourage any other possible madmen out there from thinking that this is a good or feasible way to become famous, make a point, or express that which evidently such madmen think they need to do to be heard. Ideation is the term of art here — that’s what we want to prevent.
These perpetrators of inhumanity should not be heard from; they should not be known; they should not be followed; they should not be any kind of model. They should forever be known as a shooter or a perpetrator or an assassin or a murderer, not more. Indeed, upon taking up arms against innocents, they lose, they abdicate, any claim to be considered worth knowing in any respect whatsoever. They have alienated themselves from society, almost as if they have alienated themselves from being important enough to have a name like everyone else. And by “alienate,” I mean renounce — they have renounced their humanity."

and here's Hanson:

"In other words, I don’t care a whit whether the Aurora killer was a loner. I don’t care if he was unhappy or if he was on medication. Millions share such pathologies without killing a mouse. I don’t even know whether giving him swift justice will deter the next mass shooter. Yes, give the suspect expert legal counsel; call in all the psychiatrists imaginable; sequester the jury; ensure the judge is a pillar of jurisprudence; but if he is found guilty, I would prefer the gallows and quickly so, to remind us that we live in a civilization that prefers to remember the victims and to remember nothing at all of their killer."