I haven't heard of a post office shooting in a long while.
I mention this because a number of years ago it seemed epidemic. We all knew about it because the media increased coverage with each successive incident, and we even added a phrase to the American lexicon. "Going postal" remains a popular term even today for a situation where a disgruntled person would resolve a conflict with violence.
After that trend apparently fell out of favor, the country suffered a spate of workplace shootings. It seemed for a couple years, the month couldn't go by without another case where someone walked into work, often a factory, and opened fire on fellow employees or supervisors. It got so frequent congress even introduced a series of "safety in the workplace" laws dealing with it. The media dutifully covered these tragic events, as well they should, but not on a 60 minutes an hour basis. It seemed to run it's course, and is apparently a rare event now.
Now the crime scene of the era seems to be school shootings. Each new tragedy is covered with such escalating intensity it's as if the studios now have an emergency team of school shooting experts on call, ready at a moment's notice to go on air to dissect, analyze, and speculate on the bloody scenario. I can't fault the news media for reporting on these shootings, they're extraordinary events that trump anything the Kardashians did last night, but I wonder if in someway the tail wags the dog here.
Could over reporting shootings through the years be causing some people who live on the edge to find the resolution to play out their worst nightmare movie scene? Maybe some see a body count as a challenge to be bested, or perhaps these deadly trends are a coincidence that has played out for decades.
I'm not debating guns here, obviously there's a problem there, but what is it that drives someone to pick one up and repeat a murder that happened just weeks before? I wonder if a gunman walked into a post office in St Louis tomorrow and shot someone, if the camera crews and helicopters would descend like locusts on the scene, or would it just be a byline in the local paper. Could that lower level of notoriety discourage a person from doing it?
I credit MSNBC for reverting to regular programming when it was revealed there wasn't a premeditated mass shooting, but perhaps this is how all these kinds of tragedies should be covered. When there are no new facts to be reported, move on until there is. Martyrs march hand in hand with eternal infamy.
I want news, not a crime drama mini series. let's face it, if this was a madman intent on racking up kills, we'd be watching interviews and rerunning clips daily for the rest of the week until the shooter's name became a household word.
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