Chris Smith: Sheriff who won’t say Oregon shooter’s name has the right idea

The story on the car radio had me high-fiving the steering wheel.

Sheriff John Hanlin of Oregon was vowing never to speak the name of the suspect in Thursday’s killing spree at Umpqua Community College near Roseburg. He maintains that to publicize the alleged gunman’s name would grant him the infamy he probably wanted and might well inspire some twisted, brooding individual to mount America’s next public massacre.

Hanlin is a controversial figure, I know, but I respect his pledge to regard the name of the killer as unspeakable. It’s only a symbolic act of defiance in the face of the shameful national tragedy of random mass shootings, but the principle is right on.

These bloodbaths don’t happen in a vacuum. I sense, as the sheriff of Douglas County seems to, that more than 99 percent of us shake our heads and clutch our hearts as the news media inform us of the latest gunman to open fire on innocents at a college or in a theater or at a restaurant.

But as they view images of the wholesale terror and agony and of the man suspected of inflicting it, one or two or who knows how many others start to imagine themselves arming up and settling scores by delivering just that sort of pain upon the world.

If he goes ahead with it, of course the media will report on it. Journalists wouldn’t be doing their job if they didn’t dig in and reveal what we can about the killer, the circumstances, the guns, the victims, the possible opportunities to have averted the horror, the proposals for preventing recurrences, all of it.

We can’t withhold coverage of shootings like the one near Roseburg out of fear that the stories might inspire more of the same. But I’m all for treating the suspects’ names and photographs as obscenities, and to publish or broadcast them as sparingly as possible.

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AT SRJC, the chairman of the English Department is urging students and fellow instructors to stay away from school next Thursday to honor the victims at Umpqua, to demonstrate that they, too, feel vulnerable to such an attack and to reflect on what needs to be done to stop the killings.

“I just cannot take this any more,” Terry Mulcaire said Friday. “I am struggling for a way to respond.”

In an email he sent to colleagues at the JC, Mulcaire said it feels like “collective insanity” for Americans to briefly lament each new mass shooting, then go about their business.

“Today,” he wrote, “it feels like it’s only a matter of time until someone walks through the door on the second floor of Emeritus (Hall) and I hear gunshots ring out.”

One thing he’d encourage SRJC teachers, staff and students to do on Thursday, instead of go to class, is to “organize and focus the political will to dislodge the gun industry’s chokehold on our political process.”

Mulcaire acknowledged Friday that while his call for a no-school day Thursday resonated with some fellow teachers in the English department and elsewhere on campus, there has not been a groundswell of support.

He said he will stay away from campus that day, but he doesn’t know how many others will join him. Whatever happens, he said, he feels certain that people need to sit with the impact of this latest massacre.

“It should be more painful to us than it is,” Mulcaire said.

JC President Frank Chong won’t skip work on Thursday. He said he respects Mulcaire’s idea - “I think his reaction is totally appropriate. I think the worst thing we could do is to be silent.”

But Chong prefers that students and instructors continue coming to class, support each other in the wake of the outrage at Umpqua and to take part in a campus town hall discussion of what can be done to stop the violence.

Chong wrote in an email to JC staff on Friday, “I hope all of our faculty will take this opportunity to teach, share and support students and each other in a scary, confusing time. Whether your class shares a moment of silence in honor of Umpqua or engages in a long discussion about ethics is a matter for faculty members to decide.”

Chong said he’ll work with campus leaders to schedule a campus meeting. “We need to something, and I promise we will,” he said.

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.