On Assassination Attempts and Infamy

This week, President Donald Trump experienced his third assassination attempt in the last two years. On Saturday night, the annual White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner ended prematurely when an armed man rushed a security checkpoint, firing gunshots in the process. Within hours, news sites around the world were publishing photographs and details of the assailant, including the particulars of his written manifesto.

It’s the way these stories almost always go. Whenever a sensational crime is committed, the media rush to report every possible detail of the offender; from their family history, to their political affiliations, to their online activities. There’s a certain voyeurism to it – no doubt fueled by our dark fascination with how ordinary people can come to do extraordinarily terrible things. Our “true crime” obsession now means that this exposure can extend far beyond the standard news circle. The Zodiac Killer had their own movie, while Jeffrey Dahmer got an entire television series.

But is this the right move? Should we rush to cement the infamy of serious offenders?

Compare the above examples with the mosque attacks that occurred in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019. Two consecutive mass shootings saw a single gunman kill 51 individuals and injure 40 more. Who was that gunman? Few in New Zealand know – or care to. This largely stems from what has been referred to as an “explicit moral choice” by New Zealand media to provide no infamy to the killer. As Professor Susanna Every-Palmer has since noted:

“The shooter’s actions suggested a man seeking maximum exposure. The media, presumably repelled by the blatant solicitation of their attention, appears to have baulked at providing him with what he sought.”

And perhaps there are good moral reasons to react in this way. In order to see why, we might consider the reasoning behind our most common response to wrongdoing: punishment.

Most of us share the intuition that when someone breaks the law, that person should be punished. But it’s worthwhile considering why this might be the case. Generally, punishment tends be justified in one of two broad ways. The first is consequentialist: a forwards-looking approach that justifies punishment on the basis of the future goods that it can achieve. Most obvious among those goods is deterrence. When we punish an offender, we hope to deter that offender from committing similar crimes in the future. But we also hope to deter others – that is, to make an example of the offender such that other potential offenders will choose to not break the law. The more general idea behind deterrence-based reasoning is that we want the consequences of committing a crime to be as unattractive as possible. At the very least, we want to do all we can to ensure that there is no incentive for an offender to commit a crime.

Providing infamy to an offender runs counter to this idea – particularly in cases where the offender is committing their crime for the explicit purpose of making public some kind of cause or agenda. This, arguably, was among the motivations of both the Christchurch gunman and the WHCA dinner assailant. Put simply: giving public exposure to these individuals – and their causes – provides them with the very thing they’d hoped to achieve. What’s more, it might provide a powerful incentive for others who seek infamy to try to achieve it in the same kind of way. If this is the case, then providing these offenders with as little media coverage as possible might be at least one way we can try to deter the future commission of similar crimes.

But there aren’t just consequentialist reasons for denying an offender infamy. An alternative way of thinking about our response to wrongdoers can be found in the theory of retributivism. Unlike consequentialism, retributivism is backwards-looking, and instead justifies punishment purely on the basis that the offender has – in the past – done something wrong. Retributivism comes in various forms, but is often justified in terms of “desert”. In its simplest form, this concept merely captures the common intuition that good actions deserve good results, and bad actions deserve bad results. On this basis, the reason we punish an offender is because this is what they deserve.

When we see a serious crime committed, we often have a strong urge to make public an offender’s actions – to “name-and-shame” them for their reprehensible behavior. But maybe we need to temper this urge with a more careful consideration of what these offenders actually deserve. Do they deserve infamy? Do they deserve to have their causes advanced or their manifestos published?

Arguably, they don’t. What they might deserve is total obscurity. To be forgotten altogether.

Whether our reasoning is consequentialist or retributivist in nature, the conclusion seems to be the same. It’s a sentiment that’s most eloquently captured by former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who – following the Christchurch massacre – described the gunman as:

“…a terrorist… a criminal… an extremist. But he will, when I speak, be nameless. And to others, I implore you: speak the names of those who were lost rather than the name of the man who took them. He may have sought infamy but we, in New Zealand, will give nothing – not even his name.”