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[hr style="width: 100%; height: 2px;"][h3]School shootings: malignant, contagious social meme?
[/h3]On September 14, Canadian [a href="vny!://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/14/montreal_gunmans_web.html"]Kimveer Gill[/a] attacked. He was said to have had a fondness for the Columbine shooters (he certainly [a href="vny!://www.columbinegame.com/"]loved the game[/a]). A [a href="vny!://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,20501824-5005361,00.html"]number[/a] of [a href="vny!://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/61-09172006-713912.html"]similarly[/a] of [a href="vny!://680news.com/news/local/article.jsp?content=20060918_111515_3280"]deadly[/a] [a href="vny!://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=nation_world&id=4573569"]incidents[/a] followed, right up to [a href="vny!://www.cnn.com/2006/US/10/02/amish.shooting/"]today's death spree at an Amish school[/a] in Pennsylvania. Seems like a lot in a short period of time. Coincidence, or social phenomenon? Coleman is a suicide prevention and school violence researcher and consultant, and author of [a href="vny!://www.amazon.com/Suicide-Clusters-Loren-Coleman/dp/0571129838/sr=1-1/qid=1159827617/ref=sr_1_1/002-5000304-3688049?ie=UTF8&s=books"]Suicide Cluster[/a] (1987) and [a href="vny!://www.amazon.com/Copycat-Effect-Popular-Tomorrows-Headlines/dp/0743482239/sr=1-1/qid=1159827757/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-5000304-3688049?ie=UTF8&s=books"]The Copycat Effect[/a] (2004). He writes: [/p][blockquote]Here is what I am finding: * Most contemporary school shootings tend to occur primarily during two periods of the school year - at the beginning (late Aug through October) and near the the end of the academic year (March-April). [/p] * Copycats follow a regular temporal pattern that repeats - these could be after a primary media event in a day, a week, two weeks, a month, a year, ten years - vulnerable humans have internal media clocks. [/p] * Copycats imitate the previous violent attacks, oftentimes down to specific details as that mirror the previous specifics of the shooter, the victims, and the methods. [/p] * "Celebrity" events have a far-reaching impact and modeling effect -- so, of course, Columbine serves as a dark cloud over many school shootings. [/p] One of the silliest things I have heard from cable news in the last several days during mid-September 2006, is that "these school shootings aren't like the other school shootings." This is short-sighted, and factually untrue.[/p] Before the current model (post-1996) in which a member of the student body would go into their own school and kill fellow students, the pattern was one of outsiders -- often adults -- going into schools and killing students. In my book, I discuss some of the more infamous cases (...). Every year is different, and a fresh view must be considered based upon observations that are right in front of our eyes. What I do at the beginning of a new school year is to see if there is an emerging pattern that will be the re-worked "copycat" model for the new school year. To me, it was and is obvious where we were going this year.
Here's what I see: a mix of outsiders invading school, and students making plans too (...)[/p][/blockquote] [a href="vny!://copycateffect.com/"]Link[/a] to the website for Coleman's "Copycat Effect" book, with the full text of this essay. [a href="vny!://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2006/10/predicted-more-school-shootings.html"]Here's a related post on his blog[/a], in which he predicts more shootings in October as the social contagion spreads during this present cycle.
Sounds like Coleman's on to something here. I just hope, if it doesn't come to pass as he predicts, he's not too heavily invested into proving his thesis.