begin quote from:
The
horrifying rash of massacres during this violent summer suggests that
public, widely covered rampage killings have led to a kind of contagion,
prompting a small number of people with …
The
horrifying rash of massacres during this violent summer suggests that
public, widely covered rampage killings have led to a kind of contagion,
prompting a small number of people with strong personal grievances and
scant political ideology to mine previous attacks for both methods and
potential targets to express their lethal anger and despair.
The Iranian-German who killed nine people
at a Munich mall was reportedly obsessed with mass killings,
particularly the attack by a Norwegian that killed 77 people in 2011.
The Tunisian who killed 84 people at a Bastille Day celebration in Nice, France, also researched previous attacks, including the mass killing in Orlando, Fla. The Orlando gunman had reportedly researched the San Bernardino, Calif., attack.
Some
of the attacks are ideological, some are not and some fall into a gray
area. But the highly publicized attacks in a nightclub and restaurants
in Paris, at airports in Brussels and Istanbul, and in public spaces in
Mumbai may be providing troubled people already contemplating violence a
spur to act, experts said, in the same way that many school shootings
and other violent rampages follow close on the heels of similar
incidents in the news.
“Those
of us in this field, it’s the first thing we think about when we read
accounts of these recent mass murders: The detailed coverage of
terrorist attacks may be giving people who are vulnerable or thinking
along these line ideas about what to do and how to do it,” said Madelyn
Gould, a professor of epidemiology and psychiatry at Columbia.
The
historical evidence that terrorist attacks become blueprints for random
massacres is slim, Dr. Gould and others said. No one knows precisely
what factors prompt people to commit such extreme acts, when the primary
motivation is radical ideology. In rare cases where perpetrators
survive, even they often do not have a clear sense of what moved them
from despair and anger to large-scale murder.
“In
interviews, they come across as what we call pseudo-terrorists,” said
J. Kevin Cameron, the director of the Canadian Center for Threat
Assessment and Trauma Response, who has consulted on school shootings
and other mass killing for almost 20 years. “They’re people with some ax
to grind who are fluid — that is, they’re truly at their core
struggling with suicide and homicide, and they swing between the two.
Today the person is more suicidal; a week later he’s more homicidal.”
Week of Violence Rattles Germany
In a span of six days in July, four high-profile attacks
occurred in Germany, putting the nation on edge. Ten people were killed
and more than 40 wounded in Würzburg, Munich, Reutlingen and Ansbach.
But
there is reason to suspect that contagion is a factor, from previous
research on violence. Researchers have long known that highly publicized
suicides can precede “clusters” of suicides in the weeks or months
afterward, in people already thinking about suicide. The likelihood of
such contagion depends on the prominence of the coverage, the detail in
the reports about methods, the richness of the portrayals of people
affected. In similar fashion, terrorist attacks and mass killings have
been exhaustively covered, Dr. Gould said.
The
vast majority of people who take their lives kill only themselves,
leaving no evidence that they wanted to kill others. But experts suspect
that murder-suicides are subject to contagion effects from high-profile
cases, though the numbers are too small to establish that
statistically. Only about 1 to 2 percent of murder-suicides target
random people outside immediate family or friends, said Matthew Nock, a
psychologist at Harvard.
“These
events seem more homicide related, with suicide as part of the process,
including suicide by police,” Dr. Nock said. “But you can see, with a
confluence of factors, including readily available high-capacity
firearms, continuous media reporting of mass killings and terror
attacks, that there’s certainly fuel for contagion.”
One study
in Germany of rampage killers — those who murder as many people as they
can, without apparent motive — found that these events do not occur
randomly over time. Most such attacks, between 1993 and 2000, followed a
similar event by weeks. A 2015 study of school shootings in the United States had a similar finding: Attacks tended to follow similar ones within about two weeks.
Many
school killers have researched the 1999 massacre at Columbine High
School in Colorado, including the young man who slaughtered children and
teachers at an elementary school in Sandy Hook, Conn. — an attack that, in turn, informed still another school gunman, at an Oregon community college.
In
the weeks following a mass shooting in Canada this year, “we got three
to four threats a day to duplicate that crime for more than two weeks
afterward,” Dr. Cameron said. “If you’re a suicidal individual who never
seriously thought of killing someone else, these mass attacks, whether
terrorism or school shootings, or something like Nice, they give you
ideas on site selection, on human target selection — and how to go out
with a bang.”
Terrorist
attacks, besides providing how-to ideas, may also provide political
cover to angry, mentally unstable people drawn to violence — an
ideological cause to justify acts of vengeance or grievance, some
experts said.
Brian
Jenkins, a terrorism specialist at the RAND Corporation, referred to
the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, in an email about the
perpetrators of recent attacks in Orlando, Nice and Germany: “ISIS’s
ideology may resonate with their own anger and promises them applause
and recognition. The ideology becomes a vehicle for individual
discontents.”
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