Person Of Interest Sought In Connection With New York City Mass Shooting Was Previously On FBI’s Radar: Report | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the The Daily Wire. The author of this post is Ryan Saavedra.

    A man sought in connection with a mass shooting on a New York City subway on Tuesday was previously on the radar of federal law enforcement officials, according to a new report.

    "A federal law enforcement source told Newsweek that a suspect in Tuesday morning's Brooklyn subway attack was previously known to the FBI and was entered into the Guardian lead system in New Mexico, though he was cleared after multiple interviews in 2019," Newsweek reported. "The NYPD has officially released the name and picture of a 62-year-old man named [the suspect], identifying him as a person of interest and seeking information regarding his whereabouts from the public. It was unclear, however, if [the suspect] was suspected of being the perpetrator."

    Videos from the attack on the subway showed that the air was filled with smoke from smoke bombs that had been detonated. The suspect fired dozens of rounds during the attack, hitting at least 10 people. Another approximately 19 people were injured from the chaos that ensued from the attack

    The Daily Wire normally withholds the names and faces of suspects in mass shooting attacks and other terrorist attacks due to company policy. However, The Daily Wire does publish names and faces of persons of interest and suspects who are at-large in an effort to assist law enforcement in locating the suspect.

    The Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro explained the company policy following the Parkland massacre in 2018, writing in-part:

    Studies suggest that media coverage of mass shootings can have a significant impact on the psyches of potential mass shooters - that such potential mass shooters have a cognitive craving for attention, which they know they will receive for committing atrocities.

    As Professor Jennifer Johnston and Andrew Joy of Western New Mexico University found in a paper presented to the American Psychological Association's annual convention in 2016, "media contagion" can help make mass shootings more common. "Unfortunately," said Johnston, "we find that a cross-cutting trait among many profiles of mass shooters is desire for fame." The rise of such a trait in mass shooters, she claimed, rose "in correspondence to the emergence of widespread 24-hours news coverage on cable news programs, and the rise of the internet during the same period." Johnston recommended a media pact to "no longer share, reproduce, or retweet the names, faces, detailed histories or long-winded statements of killers," predicting that if the media did so, "we could see a dramatic reduction in mass shootings in one to two years." While other studies do not make such a dramatic statistic prediction, they do support similar conclusions.

    We at The Daily Wire would like to do our part. We will still report the backgrounds of mass shooters, biographical details, the type of weapons used in such shootings, how such weapons were obtained, and other details that could make a difference in the public debate with regard to policymaking. But we will not contribute to the unintentional glorification of shooters themselves by giving their names and faces airtime. Instead, we will continue to focus on the victims of such awful attacks, and the heroes who all too often must give of themselves to stop them.

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