I'm looking into it right now. I just learned how to make Chrome extensions, but if Safari extensions aren't too much harder, I'll definitely release one.
You might try a more neutral term like "violent person".
This was an interesting incident to introduce this around, because this is a rare female shooter. You probably picked that term without thinking about gender. But now you've got a derogatory name that refers to female anatomy, being applied to a female shooter in the screenshot I saw.
Ugh, at first I thought you were suggesting he change gunmen to something gender neutral, and I was right there with you, but please leave douche alone. It's a good word, it's not hurting anyone.
The cool thing about Chrome extensions is that they're trivial to modify and implement. Feel free to make changes.
The word "douche" comes off as non sequitur. I don't think it's appropriate to use it when talking about murder right after it's happened. Sure, at some point that's fine, but this is really a "too soon" moment in my opinion.
Just my opinion, though. And the great part is, we can have it both ways. (It would be even easier if it were possible to customize the name from the extension settings. Then we wouldn't be bikeshedding right now, right? :)
Well it could have been conveyed better by talking about how ignoring the names doesn't accomplish something or is an immature approach. A discussion could have been had. A brash response, along with an image of a man with his head in the sand, is disrespectful to the OP who put themselves out there to show HN their project.
After the last few news cycles around mass shootings, I started wondering what someone in tech could do to help, even just a little, as most of the solutions being suggested were on the policy side. It's tough to feel helpless.
Many organizations (including the National Issues Forums [1]) mentioned reducing the mention of shootings in the media to lower the notoriety of gunmen. Figured this could be a fairly simple way to help that cause.
While I understand and partly agree, some (many?) spree shooters are looking to live on in infamy, and this is some small form of taking that from them.
This is obviously something you care about; probably more so than my dissent. I think that prescribing generalized explanations to human behavior (see Economics) is a dangerous gamble.
I also believe that the media has the onus to report things correctly, in full. As a national or international spectator, it may not be important whom commits these crimes. I was recently living in Seattle when a shooting happened at Seattle Pacific University. My girlfriend at the time was on campus when the shooting started and the media frenzy was actually beneficial for the community.
Often the media gets the alleged criminals wrong, and then innocent people are harassed via social media. Even if they get the names right, people with the same name get harassed as well.
I don't agree that that provides any backing for this plugin:
The potential mass murders have no way to know that you won't see their name. This would have to become a viral phenomenon and be reported on extensively to even possibly have any effect beyond making you feel better. I severely doubt this plugin could ever have a material effect on the number of people who read the names.
This also does nothing to punish those news organizations that do publish names and faces for mass murderers and since the people who care about this won't know who does and doesn't, it actually reduces the incentive for news organization to not publish names for faces.
Want to make a plugin that has an effect? Make a plugin that blacklists any news site that publishes names/faces so that when you try to read ANY article from those sites, the plugin instead finds similar articles from non-blacklisted publishers and displays links to those instead.
What value is gained from naming them? What value is there in starting a mass media speculation frenzy about them, their family and friends? What value is there in galvanizing popular sentiment against the demographic groups they belong to, while simultaneously exposing them as potential role-models to other aggrieved/disturbed members of those same demographic groups? Obviously there are legal reasons that their names must be publicized at some juncture, but I can't think of any "value" in putting their names in the headlines.
Among the benefits is that naming them in the media allows people who know them, have previous contact that perhaps the authorities don't know about, and have relevant information to have a trigger to recognize the relevance of the information and come forward with it. This may be information which is inculpating, exculpating, or which relates to potential previously unknown parties that may be involved in addition to the identified subject.
I like that you're trying to do some social good with your coding skills, and I respect that. I do have to agree that it seems a little immature. Maybe think about other ways you could use this same idea. For example, redacting the names, rather than replacing them, could show how much attention the media gives to these people.
I get the "sexinesss" of denying the person the attention they wanted, but it doesn't help society. We need to delve into the "whys" and "hows" of the shooter whenever stuff like this happens.
If we don't know the person's name, or the context of the person it makes us objectify the person, and as much as we would like to do so... it actually doesn't help us strengthen the collective wisdom of society to prevent this from happening again.
Say the person's name.
Get to know his family.
Get to know the years before they became radicalized.
Understand why they believed this was right as perverse as their rationale is. This is the only potent defense we have against terrorists and their ilk: Grow your mindfulness about the human condition.
Why would you need any of this? These kinds of events are sad for the people involved, but probably not worth spending time trying to figure out, as they are exceedingly rare and not particularly dangerous compared to other more mundane ways to die and become injured.
"These kinds of events are sad for the people involved, but probably not worth spending time trying to figure out, as they are exceedingly rare."
These events aren't exceedingly rare. Quite the opposite. In fact, the San Bernadino shooting wasn't even the only mass shooting in the US on December 3rd. IIRC, there has been one mass shooting, on average, every day since the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012.
Number of people killed this year by mass shootings, according to that article this year: 462
Car accident fatalities per year according to this article[1]: 30000 (500+ per week) .
Low end estimates of flu deaths per season [2]: 3000
These latter two are not anything you would worry about significantly (they are not particularly likely to kill you). Why should I care about being killed in a mass shooting?
Yes, if the people and governments were less emotional, we could probably avoid lots of deaths. However, let's not forget this isn't a matter where you can have only one thing. Researchers can improve cancer tratament while mechanic, civil and traffic engineers can reduce accidents. I'm not sure who's more qualified to reduce shootings, but we should also look into that.
> I get the "sexinesss" of denying the person the attention they wanted, but it doesn't help society.
I think you have it totally backwards. If anything, it's "sexy" for news agencies to barf out everything they can know or speculate about the person. It lets them grab eyeballs, ratings, and fill airtime and pages.
In contrast, removing the "notoriety payoff" is the sober, serious, and "wise" approach for society. There's a huge correlation between media-obsession after a shooting-tragedy and another attack occurring soon afterwards. [0]
> We need to delve
No, "we", the media-consuming audience, emphatically do NOT need to do any delving. 99.9% of us will never have expertise, and even if we did would be unable to act upon it.
The people who do (sociologists, psychologists, etc.) are going to be able to get at the data anyway, they don't need to get their primary research from the 24-hour flashing-klaxon news-blast.
Maybe you believe in the media distilling knowledge to us... I believe in the people fortifying and defending themselves with competence.
"Terrorism" is a rich field, and we shouldn't shy from its macabre quality. We have the right to overturn rocks, look underneath, and make our own determinations for what's actually happening.
> Maybe you believe in the media distilling knowledge to us...
What makes you say that? I literally just described their output with the word "barf". Granted, human vomit is definitely food on its way to being chemically simplified, but I don't think that's the connotation you had in mind.
> I believe in the people fortifying and defending themselves with competence.
Competence is good, but it does NOT come from a breathless 24/7 media obsession over a big scary "SHOOTERMAGEDDON" animated title and constant loops of gruesome footage, nor from the interspersed speculation over "hints" in facebook and twitter feeds.
In fact, forget the advertising, novelty-appeal, or emotional-appeal, it does something evne worse: It instills a FALSE sense of competence in the viewers. (Seriously, there are studies, look 'em up.)
I can't really parse out what your point is. So I'll just pull a quote, and forgive me if I'm being simplistic but I think this alone shows that you're undermining the intelligence of the private citizen.
This is not about "the innate capacity of man" or any such romantic business. It's about:
1. Of the entire audience being catered-to, almost none of them will have the inclination/money/time to become meaningful experts in violent mass-shootings.
2. The kind of information crafted by the mass-media is too low-quality to assist anybody towards that goal anyway.
3. People who are interested or competent in the field will instead acquire their data through entirely different mechanisms anyway.
4. The mass-media coverage is actually counter-productive to the goal of competence. In the search for filler, it is increasingly likely to host terrible "experts" or to portray news-anchors as experts. Among viewers, it creates "armchair experts" after 5 minutes, instilling them with a false sense of competence.
5. Finally, the popular style of mass-media coverage harms society in general, through encouraging additional unstable individuals to act.
Nah man. You're a person... I'm a person. It's elementary. We can always understand, and it seems like you're insulting the intelligence of the public talking like you do.
How is it useful for you, or anyone, to know the name and face of a mass killer?
It's not like you can predict how likely it is someone will murder you based on how they look or what they're called.
The point is that media is making mass killers into celebrities and that encourages more sick (read depressed, lonely) people to perform acts like this.
Exactly, it should be the responsibility of the legal departments involved to delve into those people's lives. The media wants eyeballs on them, if you really get down to it.
I think you can do this without providing a level of infamy too. That is, don't say their name, but also work to understand why this happened and work on solutions that help prevent this from happening in the future.
Imagine you are an employer. You find out that the person you were considering for hiring is a relative of the shooter. Fearing any risk, you decide not to go ahead with that person.
And for parents of murderers, it's not unheard of to get personal threats.
I don't think a competent employer would make that leap in logic.
And I'm not sure about families of killers getting death threats. In America, we have a pretty solid understanding of individuals, and individual's actions. Society generally just wants to move beyond the incident and somehow better ourselves. I'm not sure where you're getting that idea.
Understanding is hardly the "only" potent defense. There are better ways to prevent things like this from happening but they are also pretty unpalatable to modern society.
Holding families accountable for treason worked pretty well in feudal cultures. Same here. Put the onus of responsibility for prevention of tragedy on the family. Failure to report / take adequate measures is negligence.
Also I think you are making the mistake most engineers make about the mentally unwell: that they can be "fixed" if only they were "diagnosed" early enough.
Very little evidence this is the case. You can medicate someone to the point they don't care anymore but you can't really fix bugs in their programming.
I don't think society can rid of evil entirely. The best we can do is prepare ourselves (read: "guard"), and be able to respond with competence as a society.
True, some people shall/will not be "fixed" but that doesn't negate our duty to understand.
I'm sorry to be a wet blanket here. I know it's early and these are still alleged murderers but I feel no responsibility to "grow my mindfulness" with respect to the human condition of alleged murderers. Sometimes people are evil and do evil things and I can understand why good people get angry enough to disrespect the names of evil people.
I am not sure how you would read that from my comment. But to answer your question, no they are still technically human.
But also I do not feel inclined or obligated to afford a terrorist a courtesy of understanding their motivation or point of view or grow my mindfulness. Murder is evil, terrorists are evil - is there more to understand in anyway other than purely academic?
One is naive to believe understanding the human condition of a murderer by getting to know their family or understanding them pre-radicalized will bring change or make an impact or stop the next one. No offense but in my opinion this is philosophical gibberish.
Gaining an understanding of your enemy's background, capabilities and motivations is not a 'courtesy'. Rather, such knowledge is needed to achieve victory.
"If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles."
You are making a fine point, but I think the spirit of your comment is quite different from the original from @williamle8300.
Your point a agree with on a big picture level, the war fighters and analysts and policy makers need to understand capabilities and motivation of the enemy. I'm not a war fighter and I don't believe it makes any sense for me or other Joe Average Citizen to empathize or understand a psychopathic foreign enemy. Understanding in this case won't get you far.
I categorically disagree with this, for two reasons:
1) Multiple mass shooting perpetrators have cited publicity as a motive, and continue to express interest in things like media engagement and how many people they killed. The Port Arthur massacre springs to mind as a prime example.
2) The "hows" are pretty goddamn obvious. Guns and ready access to them are how! Port Arthur is another excellent highlight of why this is the case - John Howard's government instituted sweeping gun control measures after the incident. Australia had nearly a dozen shootings in the decade leading up to Port Arthur. Since the ban on automatic rifles and semiautomatic rifles/shotguns was put into place, only twelve people in total have been the victims of shootings since. Just that ban was enough to drop the aggregate number deaths due to gun crimes by an order of magnitude!
Sorry, I didn't articulate my first point well. The shooter in the Port Arthur massacre cited the school shooting in Dunblane, Scotland, as an inspiration for his crime. That happened the month before Port Arthur, and was heavily publicized in the month leading up to the Port Arthur shooting. The harm is that, by the admission of a mass shooter, the publicity surrounding another mass shooting inspired him to commit another one.
Ah, but it IS about the tools they use. That was my whole point regarding Australia's ban on automatic and semiautomatic rifles following Port Arthur. The ban on these types of weapons has correlated to a dramatic decline in mass shootings, because ready access to those types of weapons allows you to shoot lots of people at a high rate of speed. The after incident report of the Port Arthur shooting showed that the perpetrator killed almost a dozen people - a third of the death toll of the entire incident - within the first thirty seconds of the attack. Why? Because the shooter had a very accurate, high-rate-of-fire weapon carrying thirty or more rounds in a highly enclosed space. (Most of the people he shot were less than fifteen feet away.)
Now, would the incident have had the same death toll if the perp only had access to, say, a handgun? Possibly, but I doubt it. I know from my own experience with firearms that a rifle is substantially more accurate and holds way more ammo.
Australia's ban and reaction to this incident makes perfect sense to me, and two decades of empirical evidence seem to suggest their policy choice was absolutely the right one.
At this point I don't think people know why the Farook couple did what they did, but there are suspicious circumstances like their computer missing a hard drive and their cell phones broken.
Supposedly, these people were connected to those that the FBI were already investigating for terrorism threat, and if so, then there is even more cause for their names to be known, because we need to be able to non-ignorantly to discuss specific successes and failures of the FBI. That, and striking things from public discourse is very dangerous.
The shooters in the San Bernadino massacre were Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik. IMHO it's important to understand their background and motivations. Know your enemy.
Interesting to see the amount of disagreement with ajiang's post here on HN. "Giant douche"? Probably unneeded, it could just be blacked out with the option to reveal.
With that said, I too believe there's a certain level of infamy that comes with having your name spread across the nation. I'm sure there's a certain level of motivation that this gives to potential shooters, and if we can prevent that then I believe it's the right thing to do. Is it effective to block yourself? Probably not, but just the same I'd like to be able to say that I'm doing my part, however small it may be.
The reason streaking at sports spectacles is not a thing anymore is because sports broadcasters refuse to show the streakers on TV or even talk about it when it happens. It's a form of censorship but it has worked, streaking is very rare at sports events nowadays.
I think the same effect could work for mass shootings, If all the media organizations refused to broadcast any info about mass shootings it would probably reduce the number of incidents. Unfortunately it seems unlikely that the news industry as a whole would collaborate and agree to censor themselves in this way, especially since there is a legitimate public danger while the incident is ongoing. Government is prohibited by the constitution from getting involved in media censorship so it would have to be done by the media companies themselves. And of course nowadays we have social media so it's even harder to enforce any kind of censorship.
Streaking in general has become less popular than at its height, even when not done in contexts that would involve medias attention. I suspect that the drop in popularity in all contexts is because it was a passing cultural fad that burned itself out, and that the degree of media attention specifically in public events with a media presence (which also tends to have large audiences that aren't viewing through a media filter) had minimal, of any, impact.
Unfortunately I don't believe that the costs are worth it. I'm afraid we're very myopic about these things, and that we don't think about the processes or structures in place that censor things. The fact that processes are sticky and stay past their original purpose.
And like the fact that we want to only discuss, in a vacuum, whether revealing the names of murderers might cause more murder, and if the answer is yes, then that's good enough for us. How much more murder are we talking about for the price of censoring all media? Should anonymous volunteers go on Wikipedia to erase names of murderers?
Probably store the shooter list in a cacheable json-p url, say hosted in a github gist, so that changing shooters doesn't require publishing a new extension. [0]
Right now, it's embedded in a .js file as a variable here (OS X + Chrome):
83 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadEDIT: Updating to replace gunmen names with something more neutral / accessible. Japhyr and others make great points on the issue.
EDIT 2: Updated.
This was an interesting incident to introduce this around, because this is a rare female shooter. You probably picked that term without thinking about gender. But now you've got a derogatory name that refers to female anatomy, being applied to a female shooter in the screenshot I saw.
The word "douche" comes off as non sequitur. I don't think it's appropriate to use it when talking about murder right after it's happened. Sure, at some point that's fine, but this is really a "too soon" moment in my opinion.
Just my opinion, though. And the great part is, we can have it both ways. (It would be even easier if it were possible to customize the name from the extension settings. Then we wouldn't be bikeshedding right now, right? :)
agreed.
It's similar to if "corset" or "foot binding" were used as a negative slang for something.
grow up.
> Instead of "you're doing it wrong", suggest alternatives. When someone is learning, help them learn more. (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)
After the last few news cycles around mass shootings, I started wondering what someone in tech could do to help, even just a little, as most of the solutions being suggested were on the policy side. It's tough to feel helpless.
Many organizations (including the National Issues Forums [1]) mentioned reducing the mention of shootings in the media to lower the notoriety of gunmen. Figured this could be a fairly simple way to help that cause.
[1] https://www.nifi.org/sites/default/files/product-downloads/m...
I also believe that the media has the onus to report things correctly, in full. As a national or international spectator, it may not be important whom commits these crimes. I was recently living in Seattle when a shooting happened at Seattle Pacific University. My girlfriend at the time was on campus when the shooting started and the media frenzy was actually beneficial for the community.
It's not just murders. Australian media will often not report suicides to prevent triggering copycats.
The potential mass murders have no way to know that you won't see their name. This would have to become a viral phenomenon and be reported on extensively to even possibly have any effect beyond making you feel better. I severely doubt this plugin could ever have a material effect on the number of people who read the names.
This also does nothing to punish those news organizations that do publish names and faces for mass murderers and since the people who care about this won't know who does and doesn't, it actually reduces the incentive for news organization to not publish names for faces.
Want to make a plugin that has an effect? Make a plugin that blacklists any news site that publishes names/faces so that when you try to read ANY article from those sites, the plugin instead finds similar articles from non-blacklisted publishers and displays links to those instead.
If we don't know the person's name, or the context of the person it makes us objectify the person, and as much as we would like to do so... it actually doesn't help us strengthen the collective wisdom of society to prevent this from happening again.
Say the person's name.
Get to know his family.
Get to know the years before they became radicalized.
Understand why they believed this was right as perverse as their rationale is. This is the only potent defense we have against terrorists and their ilk: Grow your mindfulness about the human condition.
should we also whitewash all of history's tragedies?
These events aren't exceedingly rare. Quite the opposite. In fact, the San Bernadino shooting wasn't even the only mass shooting in the US on December 3rd. IIRC, there has been one mass shooting, on average, every day since the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012.
More info: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/03/458321777/...
Car accident fatalities per year according to this article[1]: 30000 (500+ per week) .
Low end estimates of flu deaths per season [2]: 3000
These latter two are not anything you would worry about significantly (they are not particularly likely to kill you). Why should I care about being killed in a mass shooting?
[1] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit...
[2] http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/us_flu-related_deaths.h...
I think you have it totally backwards. If anything, it's "sexy" for news agencies to barf out everything they can know or speculate about the person. It lets them grab eyeballs, ratings, and fill airtime and pages.
In contrast, removing the "notoriety payoff" is the sober, serious, and "wise" approach for society. There's a huge correlation between media-obsession after a shooting-tragedy and another attack occurring soon afterwards. [0]
> We need to delve
No, "we", the media-consuming audience, emphatically do NOT need to do any delving. 99.9% of us will never have expertise, and even if we did would be unable to act upon it.
The people who do (sociologists, psychologists, etc.) are going to be able to get at the data anyway, they don't need to get their primary research from the 24-hour flashing-klaxon news-blast.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4&t=1m39s
"Terrorism" is a rich field, and we shouldn't shy from its macabre quality. We have the right to overturn rocks, look underneath, and make our own determinations for what's actually happening.
What makes you say that? I literally just described their output with the word "barf". Granted, human vomit is definitely food on its way to being chemically simplified, but I don't think that's the connotation you had in mind.
> I believe in the people fortifying and defending themselves with competence.
Competence is good, but it does NOT come from a breathless 24/7 media obsession over a big scary "SHOOTERMAGEDDON" animated title and constant loops of gruesome footage, nor from the interspersed speculation over "hints" in facebook and twitter feeds.
In fact, forget the advertising, novelty-appeal, or emotional-appeal, it does something evne worse: It instills a FALSE sense of competence in the viewers. (Seriously, there are studies, look 'em up.)
> 99.9% of us will never have expertise
1. Of the entire audience being catered-to, almost none of them will have the inclination/money/time to become meaningful experts in violent mass-shootings.
2. The kind of information crafted by the mass-media is too low-quality to assist anybody towards that goal anyway.
3. People who are interested or competent in the field will instead acquire their data through entirely different mechanisms anyway.
4. The mass-media coverage is actually counter-productive to the goal of competence. In the search for filler, it is increasingly likely to host terrible "experts" or to portray news-anchors as experts. Among viewers, it creates "armchair experts" after 5 minutes, instilling them with a false sense of competence.
5. Finally, the popular style of mass-media coverage harms society in general, through encouraging additional unstable individuals to act.
Being informed is almost always better.
The point is that media is making mass killers into celebrities and that encourages more sick (read depressed, lonely) people to perform acts like this.
Problem is, the family could get in trouble, even if you are just a remote relative who had virtually no connection with the shooter for years.
And for parents of murderers, it's not unheard of to get personal threats.
And I'm not sure about families of killers getting death threats. In America, we have a pretty solid understanding of individuals, and individual's actions. Society generally just wants to move beyond the incident and somehow better ourselves. I'm not sure where you're getting that idea.
The murderer's names are Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik
Holding families accountable for treason worked pretty well in feudal cultures. Same here. Put the onus of responsibility for prevention of tragedy on the family. Failure to report / take adequate measures is negligence.
Also I think you are making the mistake most engineers make about the mentally unwell: that they can be "fixed" if only they were "diagnosed" early enough.
Very little evidence this is the case. You can medicate someone to the point they don't care anymore but you can't really fix bugs in their programming.
True, some people shall/will not be "fixed" but that doesn't negate our duty to understand.
But also I do not feel inclined or obligated to afford a terrorist a courtesy of understanding their motivation or point of view or grow my mindfulness. Murder is evil, terrorists are evil - is there more to understand in anyway other than purely academic?
One is naive to believe understanding the human condition of a murderer by getting to know their family or understanding them pre-radicalized will bring change or make an impact or stop the next one. No offense but in my opinion this is philosophical gibberish.
"If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles."
Your point a agree with on a big picture level, the war fighters and analysts and policy makers need to understand capabilities and motivation of the enemy. I'm not a war fighter and I don't believe it makes any sense for me or other Joe Average Citizen to empathize or understand a psychopathic foreign enemy. Understanding in this case won't get you far.
1) Multiple mass shooting perpetrators have cited publicity as a motive, and continue to express interest in things like media engagement and how many people they killed. The Port Arthur massacre springs to mind as a prime example.
2) The "hows" are pretty goddamn obvious. Guns and ready access to them are how! Port Arthur is another excellent highlight of why this is the case - John Howard's government instituted sweeping gun control measures after the incident. Australia had nearly a dozen shootings in the decade leading up to Port Arthur. Since the ban on automatic rifles and semiautomatic rifles/shotguns was put into place, only twelve people in total have been the victims of shootings since. Just that ban was enough to drop the aggregate number deaths due to gun crimes by an order of magnitude!
If a child says, "I want cake!" and you say, "No cake for you!" We're letting them determine the agenda.
Rather, we should do what makes us smarter. Knowing them makes us smarter.
As for the "how," it's not always about the tools they use (guns).
Ah, but it IS about the tools they use. That was my whole point regarding Australia's ban on automatic and semiautomatic rifles following Port Arthur. The ban on these types of weapons has correlated to a dramatic decline in mass shootings, because ready access to those types of weapons allows you to shoot lots of people at a high rate of speed. The after incident report of the Port Arthur shooting showed that the perpetrator killed almost a dozen people - a third of the death toll of the entire incident - within the first thirty seconds of the attack. Why? Because the shooter had a very accurate, high-rate-of-fire weapon carrying thirty or more rounds in a highly enclosed space. (Most of the people he shot were less than fifteen feet away.)
Now, would the incident have had the same death toll if the perp only had access to, say, a handgun? Possibly, but I doubt it. I know from my own experience with firearms that a rifle is substantially more accurate and holds way more ammo.
Australia's ban and reaction to this incident makes perfect sense to me, and two decades of empirical evidence seem to suggest their policy choice was absolutely the right one.
Supposedly, these people were connected to those that the FBI were already investigating for terrorism threat, and if so, then there is even more cause for their names to be known, because we need to be able to non-ignorantly to discuss specific successes and failures of the FBI. That, and striking things from public discourse is very dangerous.
With that said, I too believe there's a certain level of infamy that comes with having your name spread across the nation. I'm sure there's a certain level of motivation that this gives to potential shooters, and if we can prevent that then I believe it's the right thing to do. Is it effective to block yourself? Probably not, but just the same I'd like to be able to say that I'm doing my part, however small it may be.
I think the same effect could work for mass shootings, If all the media organizations refused to broadcast any info about mass shootings it would probably reduce the number of incidents. Unfortunately it seems unlikely that the news industry as a whole would collaborate and agree to censor themselves in this way, especially since there is a legitimate public danger while the incident is ongoing. Government is prohibited by the constitution from getting involved in media censorship so it would have to be done by the media companies themselves. And of course nowadays we have social media so it's even harder to enforce any kind of censorship.
And like the fact that we want to only discuss, in a vacuum, whether revealing the names of murderers might cause more murder, and if the answer is yes, then that's good enough for us. How much more murder are we talking about for the price of censoring all media? Should anonymous volunteers go on Wikipedia to erase names of murderers?
Right now, it's embedded in a .js file as a variable here (OS X + Chrome):
0: example json-p https://gist.githubusercontent.com/csanz/2862350/raw/hey.js