"At one point in the 1950s, more than half a million Americans were confined to state psychiatric institutions, many of them for life. Today, the total number of state psychiatric beds in the U.S. sits around 37,000, with most beds on short-term, acute inpatient units in general medical hospitals.Jul 13, 2018"

Maybe bring these back?

This story is unsurprisingly absent from The Atlantic

anti-Israel propaganda is more important :/

The argument is that a pretty significant amount of research has been done on this topic, where certain trends/patterns have become illuminated. One of these being is that it seems to be the case, strongly, that shooters are often inspired by past mass shooters. In the United States, Columbine is probably the most infamous mass shooting event--both in the collective consciousness of society, but also specifically amongst shooters. The Columbine Shooters were inspired by the Oklahoma City Bomber and were hoping to get a "higher score"; however, thankfully, the explosives they made ended up being duds. Subsequently, there have been countless mass shooters who, through their online posts, manifestos, and/or testimony shows that they were 1) Inspired by a past mass shooter(s) and that 2) They were hoping to get a "higher score" than them.

Going out and committing a mass shooting event is one of the quickest ways that people have learned that they can become famous, get their own manifesto out, and have an impact. And, due to the 24/7 media cycle in the US, we afford them a tremendous amount of fame which then only contributes to inspiring future shooters.

would you say that the release of the Tops supermarket mass shooter's manifesto was a mistake?

I think releasing any mass shooter manifesto is a mistake. We need to make it clear to people that no fame, notoriety, or attention will be given to them should they decide to do something like this. In addition to not releasing the manifesto, they should not use the shooter's name or their face.

We have similar media standards already for suicide because there's been enough evidence to suggest that media reporting has a non-zero impact on maladaptive social behavior.

Interesting, honestly first I hear of this take, typically there's no hesitancy nor any pushback to release these manifestos. Usually the people that want to point out how fucked up white supremacist ideology or whatever other hate filled inspiration should be aired out to basically shit on that thought process and show precisely what we shouldn't believe.

Toxic ideology needs to be publicly shamed, not hidden because (all of the sudden) it gives the perp notoriety, which honestly i don't really buy. Like 99% of people would just say "oh that's some fucked up stuff he believed, i should check myself to see if i believe any of this garbage".

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Mar 28 2023 06:56pm

I'd be happy to share more resources on it, and have made a thread in PaRD before specifically on this issue of media reporting.

I will clarify though, that I do think the discovered motivations for the shooting should be/can be released to the public without harm. There's a world of difference though between "We can share that shooter was motivated by White supremacist ideology" v. "Here's their manifesto".

Personally I think manifestos should be released in support of transparency as the public deserves to know potential motives for the attacks, but it shouldn't be shown front and center everywhere

I think not saying their names is more important, but also for public transparency it is necessary to release the name, but it doesn't have to be front and center everywhere, and should be repeated as little as possible

the people have a right to know this unhinged trans propaganda that has lead to this

Details of how they came to the conclusion that I should go kill a bunch of kids are important IMO. They are important in white supremacist cases and they are important in cases like this. I just get the sense that we don't want the wrong** ideology or motivation to be associated with things like school shootings when it comes to your reasoning. If he was motived by anti-Christian lgbt ideology arguing for violence that should be aired. They way he came to those conclusions and his sources and enablers should be aired. IMO it's the proper societal mechanism to publicly discourage toxic ideologies.