Ethan Zuckerman's musings on Africa, international development
and hacking the media.
12/14/2012 (8:24 pm)
Mourn, and take action on guns
I tweeted earlier today about my horror regarding the shootings in Newtown, CT, and my connections to the community. I grew up nearby and have friends who attended the school where the shooting took place.
An editor at CNN’s opinion section read earlier commentary I’d posted here about the difficulty in opening a debate about gun control in the US. He asked for my reactions to today’s shootings, and I responded with a brief commentary. It is currently running on CNN’s site, and it begins:
I logged onto Facebook this afternoon, terrified of what I would read.
I grew up near Newtown, Connecticut, and went to high school in Danbury, Connecticut. A close friend spent her childhood at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the school where a shooter killed at least 26 people today, police said, most of them children.Police reports are still coming in, and we are only beginning to grasp the scale of this tragedy. Friends are describing their panic as they try to reach their children in schools that are on lockdown. One of my high school classmates is trying to support her best friend, whose daughter was one of the children killed.
My Facebook timeline is filled with expressions of relief for those who escaped the violence, sorrow for those lost, and prayers for recovery. It’s also filled with friends demanding that America take action on gun control. Their calls are answered by others who protest that this is a time to mourn, not a time for politics.
A tragedy like today’s shooting demands we both mourn and take action.
Please visit CNN.com to read the rest.
Predictably, for a post about the difficulty of having open dialog about gun control in the US, it’s generating thoughtful and reasoned debate. Here’s one of the carefully reasoned tweets engaging with my argument:
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@EthanZ thanks for being another gun control fucktard shamelessly and cynically exploiting your bullshit agenda8 minutes ago via web Reply Retweet Favorite
@njacknjack__________________________________________________________________
Looking forward to more and less helpful responses.
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Mourn, and take action on guns
Editor's note: Ethan Zuckerman directs the Center for Civic Media, based at MIT's Media Lab. He lives in Lanesboro, Massachusetts, and blogs at http://ethanzuckerman.com/blog
(CNN) -- I logged onto Facebook this afternoon, terrified of what I would read.
I grew up near Newtown, Connecticut, and went to high school in Danbury, Connecticut. A close friend spent her childhood at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the school where a shooter killed at least 26 people today, police said, most of them children.
Police reports are still coming in, and we are only beginning to grasp the scale of this tragedy. Friends are describing their panic as they try to reach their children in schools that are on lockdown. One of my high school classmates is trying to support her best friend, whose daughter was one of the children killed.
My Facebook timeline is filled with expressions of relief for those who escaped the violence, sorrow for those lost, and prayers for recovery. It's also filled with friends demanding that America take action on gun control. Their calls are answered by others who protest that this is a time to mourn, not a time for politics.
A tragedy like today's shooting demands we both mourn and take action.
In April of this year, One L. Goh shot 10 nursing students at Oikos University in Oakland, California. In July, James Holmes shot 70 people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. In August, Wade Michael Page shot 10 people in a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. With today's tragedy, 2012 is likely to be the worst year for mass gun violence in U.S. history. It follows a year in which a mass shooting killed six and critically injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. And on Tuesday two people killed when a gunman opened fire at a shopping mall in Oregon.
Outside of these mass shooting incidents covered by the media, 2012 is likely to be a bad one in terms of "ordinary" shootings. The CDC reports that 30,759 were treated in hospitals for gunshot wounds in 2011, a 47% increase over 2001. Homicide rates in the U.S. are going down while incidences of shootings are increasing, because doctors are now so experienced at treating gunshot wounds that they are saving more lives.
Yet conventional wisdom argues that the U.S. is too polarized and divided for any meaningful changes to our broken and inadequate gun laws. The National Rifle Association and other lobbying groups are too well-funded and powerful for politicians to stand behind even modest gun control measures, like Sen. Frank Lautenberg's proposed ban on high-capacity magazines, which lapsed in 2004.
Americans who follow the gun-control debate have stopped expecting change in the wake of events like today's shooting for the simple reason of precedent: If Aurora, Oak Creek, Tuscon and Columbine haven't changed the politics of gun control, why should we believe the tragedy in Newtown will have a different outcome?
The NRA's most powerful weapon against gun control isn't postcard campaigns, primary battles or political advertising. It's silence. So long as we assume gun control is impossible, we don't talk about gun control. So long as we don't talk about gun control, gun control is impossible.
The NRA fights any attempts to control firearms, no matter how common-sensical, because their greatest fear is public debate over any controls over guns. Once we begin discussing whether it's reasonable for civilians to be able to buy unlimited amounts of ammunition without a background check, we've moved gun control from the realm of the unthinkable into the possible.
News: Support crucial for kids after trauma
It sounds reasonable and compassionate when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie responded to the Aurora shootings by demanding, "This is just not the appropriate time to be grandstanding about gun laws. Can we at least get through the initial grief and tragedy for these families?"
Christie, and my friends on Facebook who demand we mourn apolitically, have the best of intentions, but they are missing a simple truth. Moments like today's tragedy in Newtown remind us that the U.S. suffers from anepidemic of gun violence, a pattern that's does not exist in other highly developed nations.
Moments of crisis, like the shooting in Newtown, tend to produce brief spikes of popular interest in gun control. My research on media attention suggests these spikes are extremely short-lived, and that they may be decreasing in intensity. There was less popular interest in gun control, as measured by Google searches, after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting and the Aurora killings than after Virginia Tech.
There were almost no spikes of popular interest in gun control after "smaller" mass shootings, like that in Oak Creek. To have any chance of combating the NRA's campaign of silence, gun control groups have to seize moments of media attention to push for change.
When the story about the Newtown shooter comes out, it is likely that we will hear about a disturbed and deranged shooter and about "senseless violence," as if to distinguish it from more sensible gun violence. This language turns mass shootings into natural disasters, as unpredictable and preventable as hurricanes and tornados.
Human behavior is unpredictable, but gun violence is not. In Chengping, Henan, China today, a deranged man slashed 22 schoolchildren with a knife. None died. School shootings in America are a product both of mad people and bad laws.
As we learn more about the young children killed in Newtown today, we will hear calls not to "politicize" their deaths. I urge you to ignore those calls. There is no better way to mourn these senseless deaths than to demand we change our laws and our culture so that the killing of innocent children truly becomes unthinkable.
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DECEMBER 14, 2012
Connecticut
Elementary School
Shooting
If there’s a signature photograph to emerge out of today’s horrific school shooting in Connecticut, it’s this one.
Beyond the news value of these children being led safely away from the scene in emergency formation, it’s not hard to tell why. Mainly, it’s because of the heart breaking expression of the girl in the center of the picture in the turquoise shirt. Whereas the other children remained focused on the task at hand, this poor girl looks completely traumatize and emotionally distraught.
As well though, there’s the sense of this single file as almost a line of prisoners, not just because of law enforcement but by the way the boy second-in-line is being led by the police woman with his hands captured crossed just-so. That’s only relevant, however, to the extent it felt today — given the year’s, and the season’s number of gun rampages — like Americans have become hostages to a culture of violence.
(photo: Newtown Bee, Shannon Hicks/AP caption: Connecticut State Police lead children from the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., following a reported shooting there Friday.)
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"Fuck You CNN":
How the Press Got it Wrong
on Newtown
| Fri Dec. 14, 2012
In the aftermath of the horrific mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut the immediate question was who had gunned down nearly thirty people, most of them children, before taking his own life.
Early reports, citing Connecticut law enforcement sources, identified the shooter as a 20-something from Newtown named Ryan Lanza. A Facebook profile fitting that description was easily accessible, and social media users—from professional reporters to online onlookers—immediately assumed they had discovered the Facebook profile of the gunman who had perpetrated the mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. News outlets including Buzzfeed, Mediaite, Gawker, and Fox News speculated that the account belonged to the shooter. Journalists from Slate, Huffington Post, CNN, and other news organizations tweeted links to the Facebook profile.
But it was the wrong guy. Press reports are now identifying the shooter as Adam Lanza. Ryan Lanza, identified as Adam's brother, has reportedly been questioned by police. According to the Associated Press, "a law enforcement official mistakenly transposed the brothers' first names." The result was that, for a few brief hours in the middle of the day, based on press speculation about the suspect's identity, social media users brought out the digital equivalent of pitchforks and torches, vilifying the alleged shooter's brother and haranguing Ryan Lanzas all across the intertubes.
Political cartoonist Matt Bors, who was Facebook friends with Ryan Lanza but didn't actually know him personally, was inundated with Facebook messages and friend requests as a result. "I was getting messages from people saying, why are you friends with a monster?" Bors says. Looking at Lanza's page, he saw desperate messages posted denying any involvement in the shooting, and posted them to his Twitter feed. "Fuck you CNN it wasn't me," Lanza's post read.
Here's the screenshot from Bors:
Meanwhile, other people named Ryan Lanza with Twitter feeds were deluged by followers and tweets. Facebook exploded with pages devoted to Ryan Lanza with screenshots taken from his profile. Several of them were some variation of this:
Or this:
But these are far from the only ones:
Very far from the only ones:
Lanza appears to have taken down his Facebook page.
This isn't the first, nor sadly will it be the last time, that journalists and the masses jump to conclusions in the aftermath of a tragedy based on personal details from social media profiles. Shortly after the shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado in July, ABC reporter Brian Ross speculated on air that the suspect in that shooting, was the same person who had a profile on a tea party website. It turned out they were two different people who merely shared a common name. Ross was pilloried by left and right alike, and eventually apologized for "disseminating that information before it was properly vetted." Then another mass shooting that captured the nation's attention occurred, and lots of other people made the same exact mistake. The temptation to break the news of the shooter's identity overwhelmed the need to make sure they had the right guy.
Adam Serwer is a reporter at the Washington, DC, bureau of Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. You can also follow him on Twitter. Email tips and insights to aserwer [at] motherjones [dot] com. | TWITTER
>via: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/12/ryan-lanza-newtown-shooting-media-fail