Researchers hypothesize that potential killers see the devastation unfold and the shooters made famous in the national media, and become more likely to act on their own homicidal impulses. Studies have shown mass shootings to be contagious, suggesting that inspiration to commit one can spread via articles and television segments. Larkin, a professor of sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, found that eight of the shooters “directly referred to Columbine.” A 2014 analysis conducted by ABC News found even more extensive influence, identifying “at least 17 attacks and another 36 alleged plots or serious threats against schools since the assault on Columbine High School that can be tied to the 1999 massacre.” Among those who studied and admired the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were the perpetrators of two of the deadliest mass shootings in American history, at Virginia Tech in 2007 and Sandy Hook in 2012. She was far from the first person to draw inspiration from the attack: In an analysis of 12 school shootings that took place from 1999 to 2007, Ralph W. This week, law enforcement in Colorado searched for an armed 18-year-old woman who made multiple threats in the Denver area and was “infatuated” with the Columbine attack the hunt ended when she was found dead. ![]() It also created a model for would-be killers. “There wasn’t a template at the time for how these events are covered … Columbine created the script of crisis coverage.” “ really wrote the script as they went,” says Jaclyn Schildkraut, a professor at SUNY Oswego and a co-author of Columbine, 20 Years Later and Beyond. It set the blueprint for a generation of attacks. But Columbine was both one of the deadliest school shootings in the United States up to that point and the first one to become a national spectacle. No other school shooting had reached a nationwide audience so fast, or taken such a hold on the news cycle.Īmerican students started bringing guns to school and firing on their teachers and peers as early as 1840, and by the late 1990s, they had begun doing so multiple times a year in classrooms around the country- more frequently even than in the present day. The story made the front page of The New York Times the next day and remained there for a week and a half it was a constant presence in the local Denver Post well into summer. ![]() The coverage continued unbroken for hours. Local news stations and CNN began broadcasting the scene live to viewers around the country about 40 minutes into the attack. By the time the killers concluded their shooting spree by turning their guns on themselves, less than an hour after firing their first shots, the attack had already become a media event unprecedented in the history of mass shootings. On that day two decades ago, news spread from Columbine quickly, and widely.
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