Evil Has a Name

Like most people nowadays, I participate in various online forums and post in the comments threads of my favorite websites.  One of the websites I frequent quite a lot is Glocktalk, an online forum of Glock handgun enthusiasts.

In the wake of the Las Vegas massacre of October 1, a thread sprung up on Glocktalk (or GT, as we sometimes shorten it) debating whether or not society generally and the media specifically should refrain from publicly naming the perpetrators of mass shooting or other mass casualty events like Las Vegas.  The argument is that the people who engage in these shootings are losers who are seeking notoriety and fame as they initiate these attacks and that by refusing to even name them, we deny them that which they wanted above all else, while also discouraging other lunatics from engaging in rampages of their own.

The person who started the thread was passionately in favor of society engaging in this type of censorship and many of the other posters agreed with him.  I and a few others took the contrarian position, which I would like to expand on here.  

My position is that facts always matter.  When one of these mass shootings occurs, one of the facts is the name of the person who did it.  Hiding that detail, even if your motives are pure, is the first step to denying that the event happened.  That kind of denial, which I believe far too many people would be happy to embrace, is ultimately more dangerous to society as a whole than the chance that another lunatic will pick up a gun and try to beat Steve Paddock's body count.

Is there another crazy person out there planning a mass shooting event after Las Vegas?  Almost definitely.  Would they be dissuaded from launching their attack if our media was forbidden to publish Paddock's name and identifiers?  We can't possibly know for sure, but I would think not.  A disordered mind has disordered reasons that those of us in society who claim to be sane should know we will never truly discern.  We cannot reorder all of society in an attempt to accommodate the beliefs or preempt all of the possible actions of crazy people.  All we can do is try to prepare ourselves and mitigate the damage they might cause and to do that we need information.

Yes, information can be dangerous and I'm not advocating that the public has a right to know everything about a crime as soon as law enforcement knows it.  Investigations take time and society is best served when full, complete, and correct information is released deliberately.  Our current 24/7 media operations, with empty- headed news anchors trying to fill every second of the day with information of dubious reliability, has not improved our national lot one bit. I'm not arguing that law enforcement and the media shouldn't be circumspect.  What I'm against is deliberate withholding of basic information, particularly the withholding of information out of a misguided sense that to do so keeps the offender from gaining some kind of mythical power over the populace. 

For where would it stop? Okay, we don't mention Paddock by name anymore.  We can still figure out who he is from his descriptors and his associates.  Are we to begin to withhold that information as well?

And what about the details of his crime?  The big detail that we're worried about some lunatic trying to beat is his kill count.  Should that detail be hidden from the public as well? How does failing to acknowledge the victims' deaths honor their memory?

The means by which he committed his attack matter as well.  How many people knew what a "bump stock" was before last Sunday?  I'm not ashamed to admit that I had heard of them, but wasn't clear on how they actually worked or how devastatingly effective they could be. Unfortunately, I'm sure that there's at least one crazy person out there who learned about a new piece of technology that could be really useful to the massacre he's in the early stages of planning.

If we are to resist evil, we have to be willing to face it.  Facing it means being able to name it and being willing to say "This person, this man, named Steve Paddock, did this and he was evil to have done so."

But what we could- would- end up with if our society through its media outlets and government representatives started voluntarily withholding basic information from the public is confusion and ultimately tyranny.