<table> </table> After a teenager committed eight horrific murders in an Omaha mall on Dec. 5, readers had several different takes on how <em>The Kansas City Star </em>covered the traumatic incident.</p><p>&#8220;I am usually pretty quick to nitpick <em>The Star</em>, I have to admit,&#8221; said one caller the next morning. &#8220;But this picture on your front, with these six women and one baby, running out of the mall, that just hit me. It&#8217;s so close to home, and I think it was the right choice, focusing on the victims and the mess they went through. I&#8217;m normally not one who wants to see the murder and mayhem, but this was almost like it was in our backyard.&#8221;</p><p>Another reader thought <em>Star </em>reporters Laura Bauer and Kevin Murphy &#8220;paid appropriate respect to the victims&#8221; in a story on the front page on Dec. 7.</p><p>The paper has identified the shooter multiple times as 19-year-old Robert A. Hawkins of Bellevue, Neb. A story Dec. 8 shared a few details from a suicide note he&#8217;d left that gave clues to his motivations, including a chilling statement: &#8220;Just think tho I&#8217;m going to be (expletive) famous.&#8221;</p><p>&#8220;He said he wanted to be famous,&#8221; said one caller. &#8220;I&#8217;d say infamous, but here is <em>The Star</em>, granting his wish. I propose that all the media comes together in solidarity to say &#8216;We won&#8217;t name these madmen any more. They will just be anonymous cowards forever in the future.&#8217;&#8194;&#8221;</p><p>I understand the sentiment, which I also heard in relation to stories about Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech earlier this year before killing himself.</p><p>These crimes are almost unspeakable in their randomness and cruelty, and I&#8217;m sure most readers would prefer that the deranged individuals who committed them not get any of the posthumous spotlight that they craved.</p><p>But I&#8217;d say the decision not to mention the murderers&#8217; names would be appropriate only for a columnist. Journalists covering the straight news have to report details that are germane to the story, and the killer&#8217;s identity is fundamental.</p><p>In an unfortunate coincidence, the Dec. 6 FYI section ran a headline on Brian McTavish&#8217;s &#8220;Today in KC&#8221; column about style guru Tim Gunn&#8217;s appearance in town that day: &#8220;Gunn targets Oak Park Mall.&#8221;</p><p>&#8220;What an inappropriate headline to run the day after what happened in Omaha,&#8221; wrote e-mailer J. Leifert. &#8220;For that matter, I don&#8217;t see how such a play on words would ever really be that funny. Regardless of whether this was written earlier in the week, the events in Omaha were not the first multiple shooting in a mall this year.&#8221;</p><p>Leifert suspected what had really happened &#8212; that the headline was written and printed before the news from Omaha broke. I get his larger point about whether the headline would have been appropriate in any context, especially considering that the Kansas City area had its own mall shooting incident with multiple fatalities at Ward Parkway Center just this year.</p><p>Taste is always subjective, and the Features and Sports sections in <em>The Star </em>sometimes push the envelope into a more adult or edgy realm than the rest of the paper. But in any case, the pun in this headline was clearly a bad choice, especially in retrospect.