Texas authorities are taking the high road and vowing not to speak the name of the gunman who shot up a small-town church in Texas.
“We do not want to glorify him and what he has done,” Texas Department of Public Safety Regional Director Freeman Martin said at a briefing Monday.
Also present at the briefing was FBI Special Agent in Charge Christopher Combs, who had his own thoughts on the matter at hand.
“We don’t talk about the shooter,” Combs said, in the hope that it “doesn’t encourage other people to do horrific acts.”
The move reflects a larger movement that seeks to deter future mass killers by denying them the attention they want when they commit these acts.
According to MyStatesman, the practice is the brainchild of social media idea site, No Notoriety.
Stop making rampage mass murderers famous,” read a post on Facebook and Twitter, along with a blotted out photo of the Texas shooter.
Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina who studies the trending social effects of technology on a population, claims there is evidence that future mass shooters eat up the 24-7 coverage we give to mass shooters.
“It’s past time that we considered less sensationalist ways of covering mass shootings, and reported such grim news without plastering the killer’s name and face everywhere,” Tufekci said.
