Narcissism is the excessive need for admiration. Narcissists, in a sense, want others to be their fans. Narcissists want this admiration so badly, they would get aggressive or violent to have it. Everybody is different, so it is not fair to say all narcissists are aggressive. However, some narcissists do aggressive things like crimes that end up on TV and become “famous” for those crimes, when in all reality, they’re just on the TV for the crime they committed. 

Correlation doesn’t equal causation. There is a correlation between violence and narcissism. One of the correlations is school shootings.  That does not mean their narcissism caused them to commit that act. It could just mean they did an act of violence to seek fame. The Narcissism Epidemic gives evidence that some of these shootings are narcissists seeking fame by taking lives, which is the lowest thing a person could do for fame. On page 200 of The Narcissism Epidemic, it says “before school shootings received extensive media attention in the late 90s, people didn’t think of shooting a group of their fellow students as a way to get fame.” I believe the quote from page 200 has merit about a cause of the increase of these awful acts. 

So what are we going to do as a culture to stop this violence? 

I think news broadcasters and the writers need to be more careful about how they tell their breaking news. Instead of saying “we are lucky this dangerous criminal is now in custody,” broadcasters should say, “we mourn for all of the families who have lost.” This way, the murderer gets no media coverage, and the only thing that is said is the most important, which is condolences to the grieving families and the survivors who were witnesses.

No longer should the media stoop down to the level of the shooter by giving that person media coverage when there are grieving families to attend to.