The sensationalist media are in part complicit in the rise of school (and public) shootings. From Arizona State University:
Researchers find mass killings, school shootings are contagious
Sherry Towers was at Purdue University for a meeting on Jan. 21, 2014, when a gunman shot, stabbed and killed a student. Recalling three other school shootings that had made the news in the prior week, she wondered if the string of tragedies was more than coincidental.
In the days that followed, Towers, a statistician, modeler and an Arizona State University research professor, decided to study the data.
“I wondered if it was just a statistical fluke, or if somehow through news media those events were sometimes planting unconscious ideation in vulnerable people for a short time after each event,” she said.
Towers, who is affiliated with the Simon A. Levin Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center, gathered a team of fellow researchers with a strong modeling and mathematics background. Joining her on the project were Regents’ Professor Carlos Castillo-Chavez, ASU assistant professor Anuj Mubayi, ASU graduate student Andres Gomez-Lievano and undergraduate student Maryam Khan of Northeastern Illinois University’s Mathematics Department.
These sick individuals think that they are going to go out in a blaze of fame and glory. If the media refused to publish their names and actually criticized them (that crazy little shit), the shootings would decline greatly. Their paper can be found here: Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings
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