In the week before my school's winter break my American Studies class dedicated some time to a discussion about the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The same day, I went home to read a post on Facebook about Morgan Freeman's "thoughts" on the Sandy Hook shooting. However, when I did more research on the post I discovered that it was a hoax. Morgan Freeman had not made any of his thoughts public about Sandy Hook, and the Facebook post had been written by a man from Canada. To read the post written by the man in Canada and the story about the whole hoax scandal read this article.
Even though the widely read Facebook post was not written by an Academy Award winning actor, I think the author brought up some good points. The man talked about how the media is partly to blame for the shootings at Sandy Hook and others multiple victim shootings. The murderers in the shootings always become instantly famous after. People across the nation know more about the killer than the victims that lost their lives. And therefore killers have the incentive of becoming famous when they kill innocent people. I think that this is a good point. If the media didn't put the killers in such a spotlight maybe devastating incidents like Sandy Hook wouldn't happen as often.
How do you think people who watch the news would react to less attention being put on the killers? Do you think the media could have an affect on the number of multiple shootings?
I agree that the media puts unnecessary effort in painting the assassin out to be some sort of dangerous, terrible monster. Yes, I completely agree that the killer was insane, if not anything else, but I don't think the media should be spending as much time on the killer than on prevention and solution of the issue. Spending hours showing pictures of the crazy-looking killer and asking "expert's opinions" of his mental state is not helping anyone or solving any issue. We should not even be making this man notorious, because to some people, that is the same as fame.
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