Bestow obscurity on Sandy Hook shooter and other mass murderers

pioneer press ^ | 1-5-13 | mike nichols

[TurboZamboni]

It doesn't matter; people will forget them again because we have become inured. I don't think we've completely lost our ability to be shocked. People will always remember that 20 children died at Sandy Hook. But the murderers are running together, fusing themselves into the obscurity they so badly wanted to escape.

Maybe there are just too many of them. Maybe it is a collective self-defense mechanism on our part, our way of making them less real. Or maybe it is our little protest, our refusal to give anything of value -- even the effort to recall a name -- to someone who deserves the opposite.

I wrote a column shortly after the Oak Creek killings saying that I hoped Page would have a simple epitaph: "Here lies a small, ignorant man best forgotten." I am glad to be able to say he has been forgotten, and quicker than we could have thought possible. He and others like him are simply "not worth remembering," more than one person in Oak Creek told me the other day.

If only the killers could have known that.

[Gaffer]

Yes, Mike. But it is okay to condemn and immortalize names like Timothy McVeigh, David Koresh and Randy Weaver becuase they were American grown goverment haters, right wing religious nutjobs, or strict RKBAers. No, we can’t have someone remembering a mentally ill person’s name, a drug addled Democrat’s name or anything like that.

[BenLurkin]

I've got to believe that these tragedies are a ratings bonanza for the “news” networks.

They know that the bigger the coverage, the more likely a copycat repeat of the tragedy.

And that means selling more advertising time somewhere down the line.

[imardmd1]

Problem here is not the remembering of Adam Lanza for his madness; it is that we are forgetting how few dedicated Islamists it took to flatten two skyscrapers with 3000 plus people in them on September 11, 2001. And they did it with box-cutters! Fear the the people and their motivation, not the guns — madmen in either case.