Calling evil by its proper name.

Gregg Easterbrook

The New Republic

The media called him “the shooter,” said Gregg Easterbrook. After the bloody rampage at Virginia Tech University, few TV anchors or newspaper reporters dared call Seung-Hui Cho the “killer” or the “murderer,” even though that “would have been a simple statement of fact.” To most of us, “shooter” and “gunman” are “weirdly neutral” terms for a madman who massacred 32 people. “To call someone a ‘shooter’ is to say that he was holding a firearm that discharged, but to imply nothing about any moral choice involved.” In this age of sensitivity, it seems, the media is afraid to use morally loaded terms to describe the subjects of their stories, even when a “shooter” points and fires his gun at scores of helpless people. “But we should be judgmental about murderers and others who commit moral horrors.’’ Cho may have suffered traumas that twisted his mind. But ultimately, he chose to take innocent life, and his actions were fundamentally evil—not some terrible accident. It’s crucial that we say so, rather than hide behind politically correct euphemisms. “As George Orwell showed, unless we call a thing what it is, we can neither think about it clearly nor oppose it.’’

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