The Science Behind Why Mass Shootings Might Happen in Waves

A little-known study could help explain why it seems like we're seeing a new shooting every few days.

Photo by Taylor R on Unsplash

Does it feel like every time you turn on the news, there’s another horrific high-profile political shooting?

The shooting of Minnesota politicians, attack on the Centers for Disease Control, the Charlie Kirk assassination, and even what appears to be a bizarre anti-Mormon attack in Michigan.

These events are often treated as if they’re unconnected because the ideological motivations of the attackers differ. Is an antivaxxer really motivated in the same way as a liberalish young man who hates conservatives?

But this presupposes that ideology is the most important factor driving someone to embark on an act of political violence. While that’s intuitive and would make sense, you have to ask yourself why millions upon millions of people distrust vaccines but only one young man decided to take the life of an Atlanta police officer when he attacked the CDC over the summer. There are probably other factors at work here.

One of those factors may be media coverage.

In 2019, I reported on a little-noted study performed in part by Jay Walker, an economics professor at Old Dominion University. Walker and a colleague looked at media coverage of mass shootings and then comparing that to the occurrence of mass shootings.

What they discovered was truly disturbing.

“We find a pretty clear empirical relationship between coverage and future acts,” Walker told me at the time.

The more media coverage a mass shooting got, the more it predicted future mass shootings in the near future.

In other words, these acts of mass murder appear to be operating much like suicide clusters — where acts of suicide seemingly become contagious as people are impacted by each others’ behavior.

If shooters really are being inspired by the media attention that other shooters gather, it raises the question of what those of us in the media should do in response. Should we tone down our coverage of mass shootings?

Part of me says that we should, but the other half believes that it’s the media’s responsibility to report these things out no matter what impact it has on society.

But it is true that high-profile shootings like the ones I mentioned above have disproportionate coverage versus the amount of violence they represent in society. Most shootings in America are suicides; murders tend to be about interpersonal beefs, not political ones. Maybe we could alter the tone of the coverage of political shootings to make Americans aware that we’re not actually on the verge of a civil war.

Otherwise we might be in for a death spiral where by hyping up these endless acts of political violence, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy.