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Regarding the Southport killing, do you know the details? Because it is sick. This is not something that would be forgotten, for the sheer brutality if nothing else.
But, yeah, it's hard to predict what will go viral. The current Crime of the Century involved the death of a violent felon who was high on Fent and Meth at the time of his death.
I don't know the details, but I doubt anything there would make it Crime of the Century material. Maybe if there was a video, it would be. The 2020 events were, I assume, largely triggered by the existence of a video. If there had not been a video, it would probably have been little remarked on.
That's part of my point, really. It's not so much the violent events themselves that make people remember them, unless it's something really unprecedented like 9/11 (I mean unprecedented in the "using planes to collapse skyscrapers" sense, not in the death toll sense, since of course plenty of other events have had higher death tolls). It's other things like videos, manifestos, lurid appeal of the mental illness of the perpetrators, or perhaps a politically divisive motivation like in the case of Luigi Mangione (and even he is being forgotten now after having had a brief few weeks of fame). And even 9/11 would have been much less shocking to the masses without all the videos. Even the Las Vegas shooter is probably better remembered nowadays than Dylan Roof is, despite having had no political motive as far as we know, and it's not just because he killed more people, it's because of the gruesomely cinematic way in which he did it. Breivik would be much more remembered nowadays if he had livestreamed his video like the New Zealand shooter (and I don't even remember the New Zealand shooter's name, which is more evidence for my point) or if he had written an interesting manifesto. But even then it wouldn't really be Crime of the Century material, probably.
The threshold to achieve the Crime of the Century is really high. You might have to do something like kill a bunch of rich people or politicians while livestreaming it, and write a really interesting manifesto, in order to actually get there.
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