The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic by Jillian Peterson & James Densley

Author:Jillian Peterson & James Densley [Peterson, Jillian & Densley, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology, Violence in Society, True Crime, Murder, General
ISBN: 9781419752957
Google: Y_Y2zgEACAAJ
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2021-09-07T23:58:00.475263+00:00

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It was every parent’s worst nightmare. On July 20, 2012, Tom Teves’s phone rang in the middle of the night. It was his son’s girlfriend, Amanda. She was hysterical.

“There’s been a shooting,” she said through sobs. “They dragged me out of the theater . . . I wanted to stay . . .”

“Are you okay?” Tom asked.

“Yes, Alex saved me.”

“Where’s Alex?”

“I don’t know. We can’t find him. They dragged me out of the theater. They made me leave. . . . He was shot. I tried to wake him up, but I couldn’t wake him up, he wouldn’t get up.”

“I knew then he was gone,” Tom tells us as he relives the moment over breakfast in the family home. Tom Teves’s story is well-known. He has shared it in a powerful TEDx Talk that has racked well over a million views.32 His son Alex was killed along with eleven other people at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. In the twilight hours, Tom called all the local hospitals, to no avail. Then he did what most people would do and turned on the television in search of answers. The shooting was breaking news. But instead of details about his son’s whereabouts, all Tom kept hearing was the name of the shooter—again and again and again. And then, after flying home from where he and his wife, Caren, were on vacation in Hawaii, all they saw on the front page of every newspaper was “that image.”

“That image” was the now-infamous mugshot of the shooter released by the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado. The mop of hair dyed red. The eerie, blank stare into the camera.

“All we could see was him. There was no mention of Alex, but we counted, and in one article they had the shooter’s name forty-one times in six paragraphs.” To make matters worse, a rumor began in the hours after the shooting that the shooter had actually referred to himself as “the Joker.” Speaking at a press conference in Manhattan, then New York police commissioner Ray Kelly said that the shooter “had his hair painted red, he said he was ‘the Joker,’ obviously the ‘enemy’ of Batman.”

The shooter never actually said this. But like the myths associated with the Columbine shooting, the idea that the shooter had fashioned himself after a comic book villain, the “Clown Prince of Crime” no less, spread like wildfire and remains one of the most persistent “zombie ideas” (falsehoods that should have been killed by contrary evidence) associated with any mass shooting in recent memory.33

The more the rumor spread, the more the “media was acting like PR for the shooter,” Tom Teves said. It was then that he and Caren decided to channel their grief into action.

To honor their son, the Teveses initiated the No Notoriety campaign, introduced in the opening chapter of this book. It’s not a blanket ban on reporting. The No Notoriety protocol asks the media to minimize use

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