Social contagion: The Werther effect

Another school shooter who is trans and bullied who decides not to shoot those who bullied him but innocent grandschool kids.

These school shootings come in clusters because when the press pushes one, others decide to do copy cat crimes.

is the social media to blame? There are reports of the fist trannie murderer quoting the trans day of rage to justify her murders, so maybe there is stuff being discussed in certain discussion groups that encourage people to act on their negative impulses.

The only school shooter that I know about personally was a boy from a very abusive background who was placed in the care of his grandfather. He was not going to school but getting class assignments at his home at the time. But reports said that he had been obsessed with white power/nazi hate sites on the internet (he was AmerIndian). So apparently those sites suggested killing those who he believed harmed him was okay and justified. Never mind that he projected this idea onto people who had nothing to do with his abusive parents but were those who tried to help him.

We docs know about social contagion: when press releases glamourize or justify a murder, or more commonly a suicide.

That is why the public health authorities traditionally told the press not to show suicide victims in a sympathetic light (and Catholic church would not bury them in blessed ground): to discourage people from thinking such actions were an acceptable action.

when activists point to the problem of gun violence, they rarely note that half of gun deaths are suicides, usually older white men. Substance abuse often involved. So it's not just women and children harmed by the culture of individualism, and overdoses are not the only way that substance abuse harms people.

The various anarchist and other revolutionary fads that inspired violence in the 19th century was proceeded by a suicide fad inspired by a novel:

the idea of suicide being a social contagion was first noticed after a wave of copycat suicides inspired by a popular novel: 

from Lancet: Goethe's Werther and its effects

Beyond any doubt, Goethe's Werther altered the way its readers viewed their lives; doubtless many lived or wished to live differently because of it.” And it was a literary sensation.... 

More chillingly dramatic than the extraordinary commercial success of Werther, is the fact that it was said that people in many countries were so persuaded by the novel that, if disappointed in love, they imitated Werther's manner of death. According to Goethe, “My friends…thought that they must transform poetry into reality, imitate a novel like this in real life and, in any case, shoot themselves; and what occurred at first among a few took place later among the general public…”

That there was significant imitation of Werther's suicide was never demonstrated conclusively, but we do know that various authorities were sufficiently concerned to move them to ban the book.

so who is vulnerable to such suggestions? 

“The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement.” ― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements