Four people were killed, including the perpetrator, in attacks at a daycare centre and a house in Hopkins, Minnesota. We are not naming the attacker, describing the method, or reconstructing the sequence.

Why we are covering it this way

There is a substantial body of research, and a set of guidelines developed with criminologists and public health researchers, on how attacks of this kind should be reported. The findings are consistent enough that most major newsrooms now follow some version of them.

The central recommendations are to minimise use of the perpetrator’s name and image, avoid detailed description of method and preparation, avoid publishing any statement they left, and place emphasis on the people harmed and on the response rather than on the person responsible.

The reasoning is that a subset of perpetrators study previous attacks and are motivated in part by the attention that followed them. Researchers examining clustering in these events have found patterns consistent with imitation. The evidence is not uncontested, and the size of the effect is debated — but the cost of restraint is low, and the potential cost of the alternative is not.

Our editorial standards commit us to care with victims and with children, and this is what that looks like in practice.

What is worth reporting instead

Restraint about the perpetrator is not the same as saying nothing. The questions that produce useful reporting are procedural and specific, and they are answered over the following weeks rather than in the first hours.

• Whether there was prior contact with police, courts or health services, and whether any intervention was available and not used.
• How the weapon was obtained, and whether existing law applied.
• Whether the daycare had a plan, and whether it functioned.
• What support the affected families and staff receive, and for how long.

Those answers occasionally change something. The details being withheld here never do.

The definitional problem behind the statistics

Readers encountering wildly different counts of such incidents in the United States are not seeing anyone lie. They are seeing incompatible definitions.

Some databases count any event with four or more people shot, including the perpetrator; some require four killed; some exclude incidents arising from other crimes or from domestic disputes; some count only public locations. Those choices produce annual totals differing by an order of magnitude, and each is defensible for the purpose it was designed for.

The practical consequence is that any comparison across sources is meaningless unless both use the same definition — which is worth knowing before reading the figures that will circulate this week.

The part that lasts

Three people were killed by someone else’s decision. A small community has a daycare that parents now have to decide whether to send children back to, and staff who were at work when it happened.

That is the durable part of this story, and it is the part that will still be true when the coverage has moved on.

If this article is difficult to read because of your own circumstances, speaking to a doctor or a qualified professional is worth doing.

Sources

• Current events summary — four killed, including the perpetrator, in Hopkins, Minnesota (CBS News)