Piece Of Art

The Bridge , about the Golden Gate Bridge's suicides, clearly could be a source of copycat suicides. It is good to see there is already a discussion about this occurring. The UPI carried an article, on October 21, 2006, "Suicide documentary haunts audiences" that mentions: Suicide experts say Eric Steel's The Bridge, which shows six people killing themselves, glamorizes his subjects and could trigger copycat deaths. "All research suggests that showing, in detail, methods of suicide does result in an increase of those methods immediately afterwards, so portrayal of methods of suicide is ill-advised," Professor Keith Hawton of the Center for Suicide Research at Oxford University tells The Times of London. Steel, 42, says the most popular suicide spot in the world "already has a copycat problem." He says the real issue is dealing with mental illness. The film, screened at The Times BFI London Film Festival, gives brief portraits of the six people...

Textbooks Will Stop Bullets? Is this Oklahoma candidate only trying to get media attention? Sometimes you hear the strangest things from people who obviously have good intentions. In the wake of the recent school shootings, one of the most bizarre campaign statements comes from a man running for Oklahoma's state superintendent of education. It is so hard to believe that someone would put out this kind of thought, I will quote directly and rather completely from News Net 5's Education page, for October 19, 2006 : Bill Crozier, a Union City Republican going against incumbent Democrat Sandy Garrett, said he believes old textbooks could be used to stop bullets shot from weapons wielded by school intruders. If elected, he said he would put thick used textbooks under every desk for students to use in self-defense. He gave Eyewitness News 5 a videotape showing he and others shooting weapons, such as an AK-47 and a 9 mm pistol, at books in a field near Minco. They conducted the exper...

Fox News is reporting on the afternoon of October 17, 2006, that there is a lockdown at a high school at Katy, Texas, which is west of Houston. According to early reports, there is some confusion about whether the "student shot" is from a school shooting or via an attempted suicide in the school. As I have mentioned often, 80%-100% of school shootings begin with a suicidal individual, who becomes homicidal in the process of their plan. I am not surprised that such situations are now developing in the wake of the recent wave of school shootings. The copycat effect involves any and all suicidal and suicidal-homicidal vulnerable folks in its wildfire response. The media is confused, but the foundation of every school shooting, I sense, lies in a thought of suicide - whether by "suicide by cop" or suicide by their own hand. +++ Now online...here's the dispatch, in part: Oct 17, 2006 11:33 am US/Pacific Texas H.S. On Lockdown After 17 Year Old Shot (CBS 13) KATY, ...

Reporter Catherine Solyom has forwarded her permission to reprint the following on this blog. I am happy to see, despite many lockdowns and foiled plots, there were no fatal school shootings this week. There were plenty of "incidents," including the most severe, perhaps, being the Joplin, Missouri, AK-47 firing on October 9th, but no deaths in schools from October 9-13, as far as I have heard. Good. Why madmen set their sights on schools Some blame media. Theories include bullying, convenience and the copycat effect by Catherine Solyom - Montreal, Canada The Gazette Saturday, October 07, 2006 Beware of Oct. 13 - one month after the Dawson college shooting, something bad is bound to happen. So predicts Loren Coleman, author of The Copycat Effect , who has tracked school shootings for three decades. Over and over again, Coleman says, whenever a school shooting is given blanket coverage across the continent, it triggers others to seek notoriety exactly one week, one month, o...

Has this week's shift in the news caused decreased chances of more school shootings and thus even a slip in safeguards? Nevertheless, are there temporal signposts that still alert us to possible dates of some concern? What might occur on Friday the 13th and around Halloween? As the Canadian Press are reporting on October 12th, the Amish school that was the site of the October 2 school shooting has been torn down. From Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, reports Martha Raffaelle:   Construction lights glared in the predawn mist as an excavator began removing the porch of the school about 4:45 a.m., and heavy equipment knocked down the bell tower and toppled the walls within a few minutes. The quaint schoolhouse had been boarded up since the killings, with schooling moved to a nearby farm. The Amish hoped to bring some closure to the tragedy by razing the schoolhouse and leaving in its place a quiet pasture. "It's going to be razed and topsoil brought in and green grass planted,...

The Kansas City Star on October 9, 2006, has posted a story that "No one injured in middle school shooting" in Joplin, Missouri. Joplin, which has about 40,900 residents, is in southwest Missouri, on the Kansas border about 140 miles south of Kansas City. Part of the article reads: No one injured in middle school shooting Associated Press Joplin, Mo. - A student armed with an AK-47 assault rifle walked into Memorial Middle School on Monday morning and fired a weapon, but did not hit anyone, police said. No injuries were reported. The student, who was not identified, pointed the gun at two students and Principal Steve Gilbreth and Assistant Superintendent Steve Doerr and asked them, "not to make me do this," said School Superintendent Jim Simpson. The 13-year-old male student then raised the gun and fired a shot into the ceiling, breaking a water pipe. After firing the shot, he said again, "Please don't make me do this," Simpson said. "It was a ...

The Canadian media have, more or less, embraced the copycat effect. They are open to exploring the process, the predictive factor it allows, and the evidence, with regard to the triggering impact that occurred when the September 13 events at Montreal's Dawson College ignited the present wave of school shootings. The USA press was not so open, before the mirror events of Bailey, Colorado, and Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, reinforced the notion of a copycat effect on that side of the border. Various articles about my predictions and insights on the comparative nature between the 2006 school shootings including Dawson College and the latter contagion incidents have appeared in the following:   "Author predicts pattern to 'copycat' crimes" Ottawa Citizen,  Canada - October 9, 2006 "Copycat slayings coming" Edmonton Journal, Canada - Oct 8, 2006 "Why madmen set their sights on schools" Montreal Gazette, Canada - Oct 7, 2006 "Link made betwee...

An older Caucasian man, who has in the past repressed his pedophilic urges, comes into a school only two days after a suicidal school incident, attacks a classroom, shooting and killing children, then turns his gun on himself. Later there's a copycat incident based on his horrible act. Sound familiar? Of course it does as at least two of the recent six school shootings follow this pattern. But what I am talking about happened in 1996, not in 2006. What occurred in Bailey and Nickel Mines is no surprise to those that remember Dunblane. On Wednesday, March 13, 1996, an unemployed man Thomas Hamilton, 43, walked into an elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, armed with two 9mm Browning HP pistols and two Smith and Wesson .357 revolvers. He was carrying 743 cartridges. Hamilton, a former scout director who had gotten in trouble for taking photos of unclothed little boys, took his rampage into a classroom of 5-6 year olds, killing or wounding every person present except one studen...

How President Bush is, verbally, responding to the 2006 series of school shootings is in contrast to his silence on Red Lake in 2005. On Monday, October 2, 2006, five little girls died in Amish country, in a school shooting, the latest of six North American school shootings since August 24. The day after the Pennsylvania outrage, the President of the United States appeared at the George W. Bush Elementary School in Stockton, California, the only school in the United States to ever be named for a sitting President. [Unmentioned and perhaps unknown to Bush, Stockton was the site of one of the country's worst "outsider" school shootings. At Stockton's Cleveland Elementary School, 20 East Fulton, on January 17, 1989, drifter Patrick Edward Purdy, who had attended this school 15 years earlier, killed five children (four were Cambodian immigrants, one was born in Vietnam) and wounded twenty-nine others and a teacher. This school is only 3 miles from George W. Bush Element...

A good examination of the copycat effect is only hindered by its fogginess on my stance on censorship, which I am against. Colorado's former assistant attorney general and currently the research director for the Independence Institute in Golden, Dave Kopel has written a thoughtful column, "Kopel: Only Press Itself Can Stop Copycats" in the October 7, 2006 issue of the Rocky Mountain News . Subtitled "Killers, suicides thrive on publicity given those who perpetrated earlier crimes," Kopel asks and answers: Do the media play a role in causing mass murders in schools and other public places? Certainly. Can anything be done about it? Perhaps. Kopel highlights the copycat confirmations he sees in the Colorado to Pennsylvania events, and records reinforcing views of recent press statements of Regis University professor Don Lindley and commentary from Clay Cramer's early 1990s Journal of Mass Media Ethics article "Ethical Problems of Mass Murder Coverage in...

There are two National Public Radio (NPR) programs with interviews with me, to be broadcast on October 6th and October 7th. These will be online for later downloads, as well as on the radio. On the Media (from NPR) October 6, 2006 Picturing the Worst The assault this week in Pennsylvania's Amish country was the sixth deadly school shooting in as many weeks. Media commentators are pointing to the possibility of a copycat effect, but few are examining the media's own complicity therein. School violence researcher Loren Coleman tells Bob that a little more restraint on the part of the media wouldn't hurt. Weekend America (from NPR) October 07, 2006 Causes and Effects Were two school shootings in quick succession, one in Colorado and the other in Pennsylvania, related in some way? They shared several characteristics, but the towns were thousands of miles apart, with entirely different school communities, so it couldn't be more than a coincidence, right? Not so, sa...

School Shootings: What You Should Know October 6, 2006 An unrelated series of shootings at schools in recent weeks has people wondering about the safety of their children and how they can help prevent future attacks. We talked with one of our behavioral analysts, Supervisory Special Agent Mary Ellen O’Toole, Ph.D., to get some insights. First, be vigilant, especially now, when the events are still generating headlines, says O’Toole, who works in the Behavior Analysis Unit of our Critical Incident Response Group at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. “We do believe a copycat effect takes place after these events.” That means more than just being watchful and wary of who’s out of place in a neighborhood or school. It also means paying attention to the behavior of the people around you—especially those you know. “Be aware of people’s moods. Don’t depend just on how they answer the question, ‘How are you doing?’” There can be plenty of signs. Most school shootings are not spur-of-the mo...

Col. Jeffrey Miller, commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police, held a widely reported news conference on October 3, 2007, the day after the Amish school shooting. The public was looking for answers, of course. Miller wanted to communicate some, from his point of view. Many people clearly saw that the Amish attack bore similarities to a deadly school shooting on September 27, in Bailey, Colorado, in which police said an older white man (Duane R. Morrison) molested girls in a classroom before killing a 16-year-old and himself. But Miller said he believed the Pennsylvania attack was not a copycat crime. "I really believe this was about this individual and what was going on inside his head," Miller reportedly said . The media detailing of the events in Bailey, however, I would point out, very definitely influenced the Nickel Mines shootings - including the over-identification between the shooters (both suicidal sexual molestors), the victims (little girls), the hostage situ...

More thoughts from a mountain state... http://www.dailyinterlake.com/articles/2006/10/05/opinion/opinion01.txt Can we root out school violence? Daily Inter Lake, Montana - Oct 5, 2006 Children used as human targets in their schools — it’s the worst news a community could imagine hearing. Three times in the past week, in Colorado and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, communities have reeled with gunshots and death in their schools. Instead of studying history, students have witnessed it in the most tragic way possible. Part of the agony is that the shootings seem so random. Who would target little girls in a one-room Amish schoolhouse? Surely, the answer is no more clear than who would strap on a bomb and blow himself up in a busy marketplace in Baghdad or Amman. Terrorism is the institutionalization of random violence, and this epidemic of school violence is really nothing more than a form of private, idiosyncratic terrorism. The purpose of such attacks is almost unfathomable to a sane mind...

The Amish's reaction to the tragedy of the phenomenon of school shootings visiting their lives is a lesson for all of us. This Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Amish community has already: - refused most interviews to the media, because their image is not to be recorded by cameras, - forgiven the shooter, - visited the family of the shooter to see if they need support, bringing food and other comforting items to them, and - openly said they will be using mental health services. Also, quite instructively, this Amish community has decided that they will be not using the school (the site of the shooting) ever again, and will be tearing it down so it will not be a permanent memorial to remind their children of their trauma. Wise people. ++++ Update: Reporter Mike Wereschagin, in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on Friday, October 6, 2006, writes: To preserve privacy, police and volunteer fire companies set up checkpoints on roads around Amish homes and the cemetery, said Duane Hagelgans, s...

Tony Fields at NPR's "On the Media" just passed this on to me. Two Tibetans Dead After College Shooting Radio Free Asia 2006.10.03 KATHMANDU—Two senior Tibetan college officials have died following a shooting incident at a teacher training college in the Amdo region of China’s remote Gansu province. Separate sources confirmed the deaths of two top school officials in the shooting incident, at the Hezuo Teacher Training College in Kanlho (in Chinese, Gannan) prefecture during the college’s 20th anniversary celebrations in late September, according to RFA’s Tibetan service. Lobsang, principal of the Hezuo Teacher Training College, shot Yang Zhihong, head of the school’s Communist Party unit, killing him on the spot, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity. He then shot himself, and died later from gunshot wounds. “It is true the incident took place. There were some disputes between these two local officers,” a resident of the Amdo region said. We don’t know the...

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20061003/cluster_shootings_061003/20061003/ CTV, Toronto, Canada Expert predicted 'cluster' of school shootings Updated Tue. Oct. 3 2006 11:23 PM ET Bridget Brown, Special to CTV.ca Monday's shooting makes six school shootings in the past six weeks in North America, but an expert says it's no tragic coincidence. Loren Coleman, behavioral expert and author of Copycat Effect, predicted a continued cluster of school shootings after the Dawson College shooting on September 13.  In a September 18 email to CTV, Coleman said, "I predict that this week or next, there may be another major 'going postal' workplace rampage or school shooting." While Coleman's email may now seem eerily prophetic, he told CTV.ca his prediction two weeks ago was simply the result of observing patterns among widely-publicized events. According to Coleman, the first shooting in the current cluster happened August 24, 2006 in Esse...

http://www.northjersey.com/ Are N.J. schools secure? Tuesday, October 3, 2006 By CAROLYN SALAZAR, DOUGLASS CROUSE and JASON TSAI STAFF WRITERS Tiny surveillance cameras are mounted outside high schools and middle schools from Little Ferry to Ringwood. Staff members in Wanaque carry swipe cards that record who enters and leaves the high school. In Paterson, students are randomly scanned with hand-held metal detectors. Ever since the Columbine school shootings became synonymous with random violence, districts have spent considerable time and money trying to make their schools safe. But in the wake of a deadly shooting Monday in Lancaster County, Pa., educators say there is a limit to what they can do. "I do think you can go too far," said Al Guazzo, superintendent of Lakeland Regional High School in Passaic County. "I don't want a chain-link fence with razor wire around our campus. If you make it like a prison and treat students like inmates, that's how they'l...

Six school shootings in less than six weeks: experts comment on cluster Canadian Press via Yahoo! Canada News Mon, 02 Oct 2006 3:58 PM PDT By Anne-Marie Tobin (CP) - It has an all-too-familiar ring to it: at least three girls were killed before a gunman turned his weapon on himself at a school, this time a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa. The tragedy Monday brings to six the number of school shootings in the United States and Canada in recent weeks, and experts say it's not surprising that we're seeing a cluster. Wade Deisman, a criminology professor at the University of Ottawa, has given the subject some thought - both in and out of class - since gunman Kimveer Gill stormed into Dawson College in Montreal on Sept. 13, killing Anastasia De Sousa, 18, and wounding 20 people. He's not certain that copycatting is at play, but notes that as a general phenomenon, finding out about someone else's rampage can serve as an example. "It erodes some of what mig...

[MSNBC reports the situation has ended with the shooter dead. Out of a school of 27 individuals, perhaps as many a dozen people were shot and several - at least five - have died.] Police Surround One-Room Amish Schoolhouse WGAL-TV 12:14 p.m. EDT October 2, 2006 Police have responded to reports of a hostage situation and multiple people shot in eastern Lancaster County at a one-room school. The scene is along the 4800 block of Mine Road near Paradise Township. News 8 reporter Anne Shannon said that the incident happened at a one-room Amish schoolhouse. She said the school is marked off with police tape. She counted 13 ambulances in the area. A helicopter was overhead and numerous fire companies were on the ground. "This is definitely an enormous scene," Shannon said. Lancaster General Hospital has called in all available personnel. They have been told to be prepared for a large number of patients. John Lines of Lancaster General Hospital said so far they have received three ...

I am a suicide prevention and school violence researcher and consultant, as well the author of Suicide Cluster (1987) and The Copycat Effect (2004). Unfortunately, it has been a busy two weeks for me, as besides giving prevention workshops that have touched on this matter, I was on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory, on the night of the Dawson College shootings discussing the copycat effect I saw coming. The next several days I was interviewed by CTV and CBC, appearing on a Canadian television news program about the copycat effect. Of course, radio and television are avenues to present this material, but it does not allow for the fuller extension of insights through the written word of the online media. Therefore, I want to share what I am seeing, what I project as forthcoming in the next month, October 2006. I've been saying most of this on radio interviews and in suicide trainings for weeks. No one seems to be listening, especially in the US media. Nevertheless, readers ma...