A FREEDOM WITHOUT RESPONSIBILITIES IS WORTHLESS:

A growing body of research suggests that increasingly intense media coverage of mass shootings is partly to blame. Call it the "media contagion effect," as a recent paper by researchers Jennifer Johnston and Andrew Joy (presented at the American Psychological Association's annual convention) put it: The majority of mass shooters -- mostly alienated, socially isolated straight white men, according to the authors -- fixate on mass shootings as a way to "regain social capital" through the fame they know the media will bestow upon them with non-stop coverage of their crimes. "If these events do provide a way to regain any lost status, reestablishing dominance in the most extreme fashion, then ending the rampage in suicide allows them to avoid the retribution and perspective correction from the society they hate," the authors write. "In essence, these killers believe that they are buying stock low, and selling high."

In essence, the media becomes a vehicle through which mass murderers deal with "a deep sense of victimization and belief that the killer's life has been ruined by someone else," as researcher Adam Lankford, author of The Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive Killers, wrote in the New York Times days after Adam Lanza slaughtered 20 six-year-olds at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut:

Not surprisingly, the presence of mental illness can inflame these beliefs, leading perpetrators to have irrational and exaggerated perceptions of their own victimization. It makes little difference whether the perceived victimizer is an enemy government (in the case of suicide terrorists) or their boss, co-workers, fellow students or family members (in the case of rampage shooters).

Data reinforces this hypothesis. Several studies by Columbia University's Madelyn Gould have already established that media reports on murders and suicide tend to trigger a subsequent rise is similar incidents in different communities. A 1999 analysis of several mass murders in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom between 1987 and 1996 found that the disparate massacres "appeared to be influenced by each other in a number of ways, often spanning many years and across continents," as the Washington Post put it. More recently, a 2015 analysis of 232 U.S. mass murders between 2006 and 2013 (176 of which involved guns) and data on school shootings from 1998 to 2013 revealed an increase in the likelihood of a massacres for a period of two weeks after similar instances of mass violence.

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