Dr. Adam Lankford Argues Against Media Naming Mass Killers

In a recent issue of the journal American Behavioral Scientist, Dr. Adam Lankford and co-author Dr. Eric Madfis explain that a significant body of research indicates that many mass shooters are fame seeking and that fame-seeking shooters tend to kill and wound significantly more victims than other mass shooters. Lankford and Madfis argue that a change in the way the media covers mass shootings may deter future shooters and propose that media organizations should refrain from publishing shooters’ names or pictures unless there’s an active search for an escaped subject. They then discuss implementation of such a campaign.

The full text of the article is available at the link below.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0002764217730854

Two days after the October 1 mass shooting in Las Vegas, Lankford, Madfis, and more than one hundred forty other experts submitted an open letter to media outlets asking that journalists refrain from naming shooters. The text of the letter is at the link below

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4Z7VkWcwLk-SjFJc00tdmI1eW8/view