美国国家公共电台 NPR Reporting On Mass Shootings: A Familiar Heartbreaking Script

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

In Thousand Oaks, Calif., Wednesday, 12 people were killed in a Western-themed bar before the shooter is believed to have turned the gun on himself. It has become an all-too-common scene. According to Gun Violence Archive, an independent research group, there's been a mass shooting nearly every day for the last two weeks. NPR's Leila Fadel tells us what it's like to cover them.

LEILA FADEL, BYLINE 1: It starts with a phone call - usually, in the middle of the night - and you know. You know that someone somewhere has chosen to kill a lot of people. Now your job is to go bear witness - to try to tell the world why, speak to grieving families on the worst days of their lives so that millions of people can mourn with them and know the beautiful details of what makes a person special and what families and loved ones remember about their relatives who were killed.

These days, it feels like it follows a familiar and heartbreaking script. First, the press conference where law enforcement officers tell their community what's happened and reassure 2 residents, like Ventura County Sheriff Geoff Dean did this week.

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GEOFF DEAN: Tonight at 11:20 PM, the sheriff's 911 received multiple calls of shots being fired at the Borderline Bar and Grill 3 in Thousand Oaks.

FADEL: The families scrambling 4 to find out if their loved ones lived or died, like Marc Orfanos, whose son Telemachus, a survivor 5 of the Las Vegas mass shooting, was at the bar.

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MARC ORFANOS: So we get up, and we're down there, there's police everywhere. All right? And one of his friends said, I think he got out, but I'm not sure.

FADEL: Ten hours later, they found out that, this time, he did not survive. Neither did Cody Coffman, Jason Coffman's 22-year-old son.

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JASON COFFMAN: My firstborn son (sobbing) - only him and I know how much I love - how much I miss him. Oh, son, I love you so much.

FADEL: Then there are the vigils.

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UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Singing) Amazing grace, how sweet...

FADEL: The community uniting and comforting each other around a tragedy. And then it feels like it's inevitable 6 that there will be the next mass shooting. Since returning to the United States from a foreign assignment, I've covered three mass shootings in just over a year. My colleagues and I share the responsibilities of documenting these horrific incidents, like NPR's Nate Rott, who's covered eight mass shootings for NPR.

NATE ROTT, BYLINE: The best word I can think to describe how I feel when I have to go cover one of these things is just deflated 7. And I think the hardest thing recently has been this sense of inevitability 8 that you hear from people when you're covering one of these.

FADEL: There's this feeling now, he says, that it's only a matter of time before it happens in your own community. It makes me think of working in Iraq. There were years where bombings were so common that we stopped reporting on incidents that took less than 10 lives. They weren't shocking anymore. They were a steady part of life. And, sometimes, that's how it feels with these shootings. And, as journalists, we always think about what information is important to tell the public. I know, as a human, I always want to know why someone does something like this. The why usually falls to NPR's Martin Kaste to look into. He covers law enforcement and typically is the reporter looking for all the information we can find about the shooter.

MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: I'm getting really worried about that. There's research showing that talking too much about the shooter, talking about his motives 10 can inspire other shooters.

FADEL: So, as reporters, we've started limiting the number of times we say the shooter's name, focusing on families, on victims, on policy debates. Of course, there is journalistic value to look at motive 9. A person might be driven by some ideology 12 - racism 13, hatred 14 of a specific group of people. But Kaste says, often, there is no why.

KASTE: A lot of times, these are empty gestures of violence that we should not dignify 15 with the assumption that there is a reason behind it that needs to be discussed and shared with millions of people.

FADEL: There's also a helplessness to this work, says NPR's Hansi Lo Wang.

HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: As a reporter, I wonder, does bearing witness and telling people around the country the hurt, the death, the destruction that people are feeling - is that enough?

FADEL: We all ask ourselves, is this our new normal - this inexcusable business of carnage? And will we be, or are we already numb 11 to it?

Leila Fadel, NPR News.