Fear.  Fear possesses the human race; it is a presence that never sleeps.  Fear eats away at sanity and leaves nothing but vulnerability.  Fear is paralyzing.  Imagine walking into some place you find comfort, a place in which you feel safe.  Imagine never being able to walk within a five block radius of this place because of fear. Imagine as if you are a student attending Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.  The only affiliations you have with going here are positive: you have gained experience, education and friendships.

Then one day you find yourself standing in a hallway, sweating and unable to move. There is a student you recognize holding a gun.  Everyone around you holds their breath and makes short mortified glances at one another.  Your heart is racing and fear has overtaken your entire body.  You reminisce over your life that you wish had been extended.  You convince yourself that you will not survive.  You watch as this 26-year-old student kills eight students, one teacher and then himself.  This image is not erasable.  It repeats in your head over and over again.  You try to relive it and tell yourself to do something, not to just stand there staring aimlessly; you want to help, but you can’t.

Let the victims of any shooting be remembered because their lives ended abruptly and unfairly, but do not let the shooters be remembered. We cannot allow the media to provoke people who are vulnerable.  Although as a journalist I understand the aspect of newsworthy topics, we have to take into consideration the people who were there.  We cannot paste the image of a mass murderer on the abundance of screens that surround us.  By exposing this face to the children that are constantly staring at an apple product, we are showing them violent and disturbing behavior.  How are you to explain to your child that a man decided to take ten peoples lives?  There is no explanation. This person may have had a great deal of inner pain that others were not aware of, but this person chose to become a killer, a mass murderer, a person who killed someone elses child.  The people who were affected or present at the shooting will never be able to get the image of the shooter out of their mind.  The last thing these people need is seeing the face of person who killed someone they care about broadcasted in every form of media.  As citizens of the United States, emphasis on the word “United,” we owe it to one another to experience the tragedy as a whole.  We owe it to the survivors to cope with the shooting in peace and we owe it to anyone who lost a love one to mourn in peace.  Not only do we need to take into consideration of the feelings of everyone, but also the safety.  If the shooter is not caught right away, he/she could use the attention from the media as ammunition to continue to repeat the same painful process.  In addition, if someone else were to want to draw attention to themselves and saw how much attention a mass shooter received from the media, then we may experience a copy-cat incident.

Bottom line:  The mass shooter does not deserve the attention of the media nor does the public sensitive to the situation deserve to relive the tragedy.