Experts who study mass shootings in the United States have found that would-be killers read up on those who came before them, signaling that "cultural contagion" is a factor behind their acts, The New York Times reports. Oregon community college shooter Christopher Harper Mercer, for example, had recently uploaded a video about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown; the shooter at Sandy Hook had previously studied Columbine and the 2011 Norway attack in which 77 were killed.
"If you blast the names and faces of the shooters on news stations and constantly repeat their names, there may be an inadvertent process of creating a blueprint," Dr. Deborah Weisbrot, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Stony Brook University, told The New York Times.
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