The Media Are Strangely Cautious about a Mass Shooter’s Motives, Just This One Time

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

 

On March 27, three nine-year-old students and three staff members at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tenn., were shot to death by a 28-year-old former student. More than two weeks later, that is still all we know for sure about this atrocity.

 

As NBC News reported over the weekend, “Investigators have not yet identified a clear motive in the attacker’s journal writings, and authorities have not provided any details publicly to back up their early suggestion that the shooter may have felt resentment toward the school.” Although public reporting indicates that the shooter suffered from mental-health problems, targeted that school specifically, and allegedly struggled to some degree with her gender identity, law-enforcement officials have established “no direct motive” for the killings.

 

In this vacuum, NBC News suggests, conservatives irresponsibly “seized” on the killer’s gender issues and the prodigious writing she left behind — including a suicide note and several journals, according to local police — and concluded that these proclivities implied an ideological motive. That was speculative. But the absence of evidence to dispel that speculation only fuels more of it. Indeed, the conspicuous information blackout around this killer contributes to the impulse to engage in conjecture, partly because it represents such a departure from the approach that media outlets applied to prior episodes of mass violence.

 

It didn’t require divination to identify the motives that led a gunman to murder Jews praying at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. But the public didn’t have to engage in that kind of speculation. Within hours of that heinous attack, the shooter’s antisemitic writings became the subject of national reporting, prompting analysts and politicians alike to allege, absent any evidence (indeed, ignoring counter-evidence), that Donald Trump had inspired the killer.

 

Police in Florida eventually released a video of the gunman who targeted Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, who filmed himself gleefully confessing his intention to murder his classmates just hours before the act. Indeed, that was probably necessary to quell the baseless speculation around the notion that the school shooter was a member of a white-supremacist group. The claim was derived — erroneously, it turned out — from the forensic analyses freelancers and experts alike often perform on a shooter’s writings following acts of mass violence like his.

 

“Nineteen minutes before the first 911 call alerted the authorities to a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Tex., a hate-filled, anti-immigrant manifesto appeared online,” the New York Times reported just hours after a gunman killed 23 people and wounded 23 more in 2019. Authorities were still evaluating the “2,300-word screed” to “determine whether it was written” by the alleged shooter when its outlines appeared in the paper of record. Amid an elite outcry, the internet services provider that hosted the online forum the shooter frequented withdrew its services, ostensibly to prevent others from becoming similarly radicalized.

 

The murder of ten people at a Boulder, Colo., grocery store in 2021 was almost instantly attributed to a “white man” and a “white supremacist,” demonstrating that “white men are the greatest threat to our country.” Those assumptions proved false when the shooter was identified as a member of a migrant family from Syria struggling with complex mental-health problems. From there, speculation turned to the notion that the killer was animated by religious fervor. That’s when the experts stepped in and began to apply their rigor to assays of the shooter’s “social-media presence” to glean the suspect’s motives.

 

New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office mourned the extent to which the manifesto penned by the teenage mass murderer who killed ten black shoppers at a Buffalo supermarket in 2022 became widely available online. Its popularity was attributable both to the fact that the shooter’s racist philosophy was attractive to racists and that his violent actions served to discredit white supremacy among opponents of white nationalism. Indeed, an unspoken conspiracy of aligned interests between these opposing camps perversely contributed to the promotion of the shooter’s views. But those views were no mystery. They were established by “an official familiar with the investigation,” formally confirmed by lawmakers, and denounced by prominent figures in American political life, including the president himself, within days of the attack.

 

There are contrapositive examples of this philosophy, too. The impulse to scour the depths of the internet to assign some discernible motive to a shooter’s actions sometimes turns up discomfiting facts, at which point the press appears compelled to tamp down the public’s speculation.

 

The gunman who opened fire on pedestrians at a Dayton, Ohio, nightlife district in 2019 had “no racial or political motive,” according to the sources who eagerly spoke on background to CNN about the would-be killer. This despite the fact that he “retweeted extreme left-wing and anti-police posts, as well as tweets supporting Antifa, or anti-fascist, protesters.” It was “beyond irresponsible to use the Dayton shooter’s lefty Twitter to assign a political motive,” wrote NBC News disinformation reporter Brandy Zadrozny. Granted. But that speculation was fueled by reporting practices that were standard operating procedure at the time.

 

A similar approach characterized an effort in the political press to denude the manifesto left behind by a Los Angeles cop killer who paralyzed the city in 2013, in which the shooter justified his actions as a response to America’s endemic racism, police violence, and, ironically, lax gun laws. But the shooter’s writings and self-stated motives were not hidden from public view. Likewise, the ramblings of the man who attempted to massacre Republican lawmakers at a congressional baseball practice in 2017 were similarly scrutinized, if only to muddy the perception that the shooter’s ideological affinities inspired him to kill.

 

With each passing day and as the violence in Nashville passes further from memory, a new standard is emerging — one that seems to apply only to this specific case and this particular shooter. If this new approach were the result of a deliberative effort to prevent copycat attacks, it would be one thing. But the pattern already established by America’s all-too-familiar episodes of mass gun violence suggests something else is at work. The Nashville killer’s motives may not be known, but the political media’s are all too easy to discern.