CALIBRE EDITORIAL: REASONABLE SPEECH CONTROL

Another day, another pathetic social failure tries to make himself seem like a man by killing a bunch of defenseless students, as though that's somehow related to manhood.

But some people don't seem to distinguish between success and celebrity. Or maybe they do, but they know full well they'll never be worth a damn, so they have to settle for fame.

One thing is for sure, though: these no-count dirtbags sure seem driven to make people pay attention to them, and the news media seems equally willing to indulge them.

That's part of what makes the decision by the Roseburg Sheriff not to name the shooter so admirable. And it makes me think that this may be a significant part of the long term solution: lionize the acts of the survivors like Chris Mintz who was shot seven times fighting to stop the murderer, and ignore the repulsive losers committing the crimes.

We need, as a civilization, to focus on traits like courage and strength, and reward those who fight back instead of giving murderers the attention they crave.

And that is why I have a proposal for all of the media outlets who've been giving voice to the old arguments about gun control, as though taking away guns would somehow reduce casualties (apparently these reporters don't have memories long enough to include 9/11, or enough knowledge or interest in research to have looked up the Happy Land slaughter, or the Bath school killing, or even the population-adjusted figures for mass shootings in European countries with stricter gun control...hint: it's worse elsewhere and gun control isn't helping.)

So here is my proposal to the media who want to push for stricter gun control: I would like to see you all get behind my new idea, which I am calling Reasonable Speech Control.

It's not that you won't be able to talk about these murderers. You'll just need to apply to the government for a license to do so. It'll be illegal, but as long as you can show you have a need to publicize them, you'll be exempted from the law. If your license lapses and you're caught writing about it, that'll be a crime, but just keep your license up to date and you'll be fine.

Too onerous? Maybe we could just go with universal background checks: if you want to talk about the murderers, we'll look at your history and try to find out if you have a past which suggests you might use your freedom of speech to call significant attention to the murderer.

I assume that American media outlets will have no problem with this; after all, I think everyone can agree that there is no way the framers of the US Constitution could possibly have predicted the degree of influence that the 24 hour panic cycle could wield. They certainly could not have foreseen a situation in which one person could type out a 140-character blurb that would potentially spread information to the entire globe. They wrote the First Amendment at a time when printing technology was slightly more advanced than a rubber stamp, and hardly anyone could read.

As a professional journalist myself, I'm all too aware that news culture has become an unhealthy obsession, and we need to stop the killings somehow. Who can reasonably say that CNN has a genuine need to transmit the name of a dead murderer to people a thousand miles away? He's not a threat anymore and he was too far away even before his death. His identity is meaningless.

And since we can't trust the media outlets to self-censor - after all, every journalist is self-censoring until they're not - I don't see a way forward without making it illegal, and then issuing permits. In my opinion, the censoring business has a huge task on its hands. However, if doing so protects people then it is a worthwhile cause. Or at the very least, I would suggest universal background checks and a cooling-off period before you can talk about a sensitive topic.

After all, if it saves just one life, isn't it worth infringing on a bit of freedom?