On the Mass Murder in Aurora, Colorado

Another senseless mass murder in America, this time in Aurora, Colorado. Twelve good people have been cut down, leaving family and friends behind in the most unbearable way, and over fifty have been wounded, some no doubt to suffer permanent physical and emotional damage. I'm profoundly sorry for them, though of course the phrase means next to nothing since there's nothing any of us can really do at least for now: what's done cannot be undone, and that's no doubt all that matters to the victims' families and friends. Most of my own family are long departed, but not in a violent way – they passed from natural causes. If any had been taken from me in such a massacre, I believe my rage and anguish would know no bounds.

The current event seems distressingly similar to others: an undeniably intelligent but extremely disturbed individual decides – in fact plans for months, it would appear – to put an end to his life or his current way of living with a bloody splash across the news pages. He trades whatever futurity he might have had for a week or so of murderously ill-got fame. The fact surely is that our violent, sick culture has provided such people with a new social form: a rage-fueled, novel way of breaking through their thick wall of despair. It's almost, we might say, an alternate career path for the angry and the twisted.

Of course the newscasts and Internet rags all oblige the malcontent, mentioning his name and flashing his image every chance they get, itemizing all his weaponry and telling us everything they can find out about him, even as they print anguished calls from the victims' family members and friends telling them not to do such inexcusably batshit-insensitive things. Neither is it helpful to hear the repetitive and insensitive use of the term "shooter" to characterize the coward who commits such a crime – this one couldn't even mow down a cinema full of unarmed, unsuspecting people without dressing in riot gear and rendering himself invulnerable. How about we stop calling these people shooters? It's an irritatingly neutral, decontextualized word that marks a retreat from ethical terms such as "killer" and "murderer" and a movement towards appreciation at the merely technical or mechanical level: a "shooter" is simply someone who pulls the trigger of a gun. Not only is the word symptomatic of an anesthetized, genuine communication -impoverished culture, it also ends up conferring a twisted confraternal status that attracts fame-seekers. It implies that one who does this sort of thing isn't simply a vicious criminal, a vile piece of flotsam, etc. No, you see, he's a "shooter." Well look at him, then! My advice? Please stop using that word if you've picked it up – listening to the so-called news' breathless, mindless effusions spawns bad habits all too easily.

I also refuse to play into any of these killers' hands by mentioning their real name. If there were any justice in the universe, if and when such a person is convicted, his fate would be to stare at a whitewashed wall for the rest of his miserable life until he drools into his tepid bowl of gruel. No communication with others, no mention of his sorry exploit or any continuing coverage of it in the media. Just dead silence: the certainty that his pathetic "me" has been perpetually razed from the book of life and that there will be no ego-stroking feedback from the society he harmed so gravely. These people think they are going to be famous and stay famous. What if we just don't say a damned thing about them in any personally identifiable way, beyond perhaps a brief initial mention, if that? It might have a positive effect, making others less likely to join the club, so to speak. We live in a culture that seems increasingly unable to distinguish between what is justly "famous" and what is "infamous" (people routinely use the words interchangeably) so according any sort of respect and status to bloody murderers is doubly unwise.