“Shooting Spree”

Whitman.jpgThis is one “convention” of journalists that could use some some serious reflection. Whenever someone shoots more than one or two victims, members of the chattering class will refer to the incident as a “shooting spree.” The phrase, ringing so close to the more common “shopping spree,” makes it sound as if someone were having just a whole lot of fun killing people.

The phrase is problematic on so many levels. It has become a particularly obnoxious cliché in the vast majority of cases, it is anything but accurate; furthermore, and more to the point, the phrase could encourage impressionable fringe characters by making the actions of a crazy person sound attractive and fun.

I don’t know which is a worse offense, frankly. I hate cliché s, I hate fuzzy, inaccurate prose, but the idea of making a destructive act of utter desperation sound like fun does not strike me as all that useful, either.

The fact is, though, that I also hate the worry-wart pose of people who seem to believe that language has power that it does not. This whole effort to sanitize language of its potential to offend strikes me as wrong-headed. We do far better when we teach people to deal with the insults that come their way than when we try to reconfigure the world such that insults become an impossibility. It is earnest, well meaning, but futile to attempt to do otherwise.

The use of the term shooting spree strikes me as a different matter, altogether. Discouraging its use has none of the above motivations.The phrase  simply represents sloppy writing that has the potential to affect people’s behavior in a very negative way. Ladies and gentlemen of the press, as professional communicators I feel certain that you can find another way to refer to these episodes, one that is accurate and does not make murder sound like fun. Rampage will work, and it is accurate. Couldn’t you use that instead?

References:
Spree from the Free Dictionary
Spree from Mirriam-Webster
Spree Killing from Wikipedia

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