To: President Donald Trump, The United States House of Representatives, and The United States Senate
Deny publicity to rampage shooters.
Again and again, we've had madmen commit mass murder by invading our schools, our shopping malls, our public buildings and shooting everyone in sight. Most of them are suicidal and intent on spreading their pain to the rest of us before going out in a blaze of glory. Why give them that infamy? Let's make it illegal to publish their names in the media, same as a rape victim. Don't the mentally ill deserve privacy too? And if the lack of publicity means they make some other choice than mass murder, don't we all deserve that much sanity? By all means, let's make it easier for the mentally ill to get treatment, but first and foremost, let us take their names out of the public arena. Let the madmen among us understand that any such act will not make them famous, It will, instead, guarantee their obscurity.
Why is this important?
I live in Stockton, CA, site of the first big school shooting in 1989, when Patrick Purdy shot 35 children and teachers before killing himself. In all that time, we've done pretty much nothing to prevent the next one. As a result there have been dozens more, and now there's Sandy Hook. How many more dead kids can YOU handle?