Profile of a School Shooter: Ingredient 13 - The Columbine Copycat Effect

The Cult of Columbine now dictates that the crimes be more shocking and the body counts be higher with each attempt. Including explosives. Ways to carry more ammo. Ways to prevent people from escaping. Though they usually worked alone, sometimes in pairs, they all worked towards a singular goal. Destruction of our society from within. They wanted to make us hurt, this much is true but more than they they wanted that hurt to be known, and impossible to forget.

Mass shooters are all copy cats now, carbon copies of carbon copies.

The goal of mass shootings isn't just to kill people. Mass shooters are often suicidal as well as homicidal. They have usually already decided to end their own lives through suicide by cop. If death was their eventual goal, why did they feel the need to create such a spectacle around it?

Part of that power they are looking for comes from the media attention. The attention previous crimes have gathered is usually part of their overall plan. If they just walked into a building and shot people without the 24 hour news cycle, choppers circling overhead and wall to wall coverage for the next few weeks there would be no point.

Most people make a distinction between a terrorist attack and a mass shooting, but there is really very little difference. The fear that spreads outward from that one attack can reach the entire nation, and even the world. It is a fear that can make even those farthest from the actual shooting afraid to go out in public.

The media is a powerful force in our modern society. It represents a certain form of control to these boys.The crimes are growing more shocking because they have to, the media wouldn't cover them otherwise. Columbine was splattered across the news for months, now it sometimes takes days for the major coverage to play out.

Cultural behaviorist and noted author of The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines, Loren Coleman makes a good case for some media regulation on the coverage of school shootings.

If the only images shown of the Columbine killers had been their lifeless bodies lying in the library perhaps it would never have become the social script that it has. Instead they showed us the fear the attacks caused, the power the shooters had over the bullies, the sympathetic profiles, and the cult following the shooters later gathered.


Since 2000, most mass shooters have left behind signs that they had more than a passing obsession with the events at Columbine. There are hundreds of websites dedicated to the Columbine massacre with a great many of them focused on the shooters as sympathetic antiheroes.

There are entire groups online of young people dedicated to memorializing and sympathizing with past school shooters. It isn't hard to imagine that some of the modern shooters motivation lies here.

They think that people will love them, people will fear them, and most of all people will never forget them.

If you want to change mass shooters, we need new media responsibility on how these incidents are covered. Limit the amount of coverage, and the use of the shooters name or image. Focus on the victims not the shooter. Part of their power is in being "known" if you take that away some of the appeal may be lost.