“In the old days, you imagine Bonnie and Clyde getting excited when they made the papers. Now they’re taking it into their own hands. They’re putting out the stories themselves. It’s depressing.” WaPo’s Joel Achenbach on the Virginia murders in the age of social media: A killer’s ultimate selfie. While there’s been a lot of focus on the social media element of this event, it’s worth noting that what made the act especially notable and newsworthy is the fact that it happened on live television (a technology neither new nor particularly social).

+ The New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson: “You see the man aim — gun in one hand, mobile phone in the other. Suddenly the calm banality of a morning newscast is transformed into a horror. It’s hard to watch. But watch it is of course what many people did.”

+ Jared Keller in Pacific Standard: Is it ethical to watch a murder caught on tape? A bigger question might be whether it’s ethical for the vast majority of Americans to maintain a field of vision entirely scrubbed of any hint of what the issue of gun violence actually looks like.