The Huffington Post on Copycats
In looking for the various factors involved in the recent wave of "rampage shootings," The Huffington Post columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson posted his thoughts on the afternoon of Friday, April 10, 2009. Huffington Post's Political Analyst and Social Issues Commentator, it was good to read, briefly reviewed the influence of copycats in conjunction with these events. Here is an excerpt of the copycat reflections, from Mr. Hutchinson's posting, "No Easy Answer to Mass Killing Wave," The Huffington Post , April 10, 2009 | 02:28 PM (EST): Suicide prevention and school violence researcher Loren Coleman examined the media saturation coverage of the school shootings in the late 1990s topped by Columbine. He found a direct cause and effect relation between them. In his book How The Media and Popular Culture Trigger The Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines , Coleman found that the copycat killings followed a regular temporal pattern that repeated themselves after a ...