Any school shooting is tragic, but incessant back to back coverage outside of the immediate affected area is not very helpful to anyone, and has been shown [1] to cause copy cats [2]. The impact to the community shouldn’t be glossed over, but especially for this particular incident, there seems to be a lot of focus on the identity of the shooter (and why it has been a topic of discussion), and that’s what especially results in copy cats. If the goal is to minimize mass shootings, not sensationalizing them is the key.
Any school shooting is tragic, but incessant back to back coverage outside of the immediate affected area is not very helpful to anyone, and has been shown [1] to cause copy cats [2]. The impact to the community shouldn’t be glossed over, but especially for this particular incident, there seems to be a lot of focus on the identity of the shooter (and why it has been a topic of discussion), and that’s what especially results in copy cats. If the goal is to minimize mass shootings, not sensationalizing them is the key.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0117259 ↩︎
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/us/school-threats-closings.html ↩︎