Study: Mass shootings have contagion effect

About 15 years ago, law enforcement reacted to an alarming trend in school shootings by developing protocol to swiftly locate and take out the gunman. As the years went on, the trend failed to abate.

So, another idea emerged — a rather unusual one: “Don’t Name Them,” a program adopted by the FBI and developed in part by Texas State University criminal justice professor Pete Blair that encourages media not to name perpetrators of mass shootings.

The idea, whose roots date back a century, is to reduce attention awarded to these murderers. Except on a few temporary occasions, major media have not adopted the notion.

It’s now taking on new urgency, however, with the killing of police officers in the past month that have raised concerns of a possible emerging trend. Could targeted killing of law enforcement increase in a wave of so-called “copycat crime,” spurred by the nationally televised attacks in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La.?

When criminologist Arthur MacDonald in 1912 published research on infamous assassins, his top recommendation to stem the problem was to make publishing the killers’ names illegal in media reports. Because, he found, many of the killers drew inspiration from the stories of killers before them.

Blair, also executive director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training program, which instructs police protocol for active shooter scenarios, said the psychology of these latest attacks differs little from the spate of mass shootings in the U.S. since the century’s turn.

“You see people who are upset. In this case, they seem to be upset with police. They get angry. They don’t see any resolution, then we see them start to plan and launch an attack,” he said. “And that’s the same for other active shooter events.”

Research completed last year shows that shootings in the U.S. since 2005 occurred in dramatic spikes. The research did not examine the motivations of each shooting, but relied on numerical data to conclude that highly publicized mass shootings increased the likelihood of more mass shootings, creating a “contagion effect.”

Experts point out that numbers can’t prove that one shooting caused another. But case studies of individual shooters have shown they drew inspiration from past shooters. And the contagion effect comes as no shock to experts.

“The more publicity, and typically the more sensationalized the crime, the greater the likelihood you’re going to find a copycat and a contagion effect,” said Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and consultant to the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Units.

That’s because the magnitude of media coverage can be seen as a reflection of the power of the shooter to achieve a legacy that they think would otherwise have been impossible. For example, a shooter who killed nine people at an Oregon community college in October had previously written in a blog post, “Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.”

According to The New York Times, he had also posted online videos about a shooter who killed 27 people at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. That shooter, according to the Times, had studied the shooters who killed 13 at Columbine High School in 1999.

Sherry Towers, a professor of statistical modeling at Arizona State University who lead the 2015 research into the contagion effect, said “different kinds of mass public killings may be contagious in type.”

It’s a basic human behavior: People identify with people like them. Someone who hates police will connect with the story of someone who hates police. Someone bullied in school who hates their peers will identify with someone similar.

Meloy said killers often envy the examples they admire. They feel jealous of what one killer has achieved, and they want to do more.

But the highly publicized case of a mass shooting won’t move an otherwise happy person to commit murder. A large number of mass shootings occur when conditions become fertile for hateful feelings.

Experts agree: The best way to address the trend of public shootings is for every person to take note of friends or neighbors who struggle through life, and to reach out with offers of help before things turn violent.

“That’s what keeps the fabric of society together,” Meloy said. “When people pay attention to the suffering in their midst and act.”