How Shootings Spread
On October 10 at about 10 pm, Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd of concertgoers. From his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort, he shot and killed 58 people, injuring hundreds more.
National discourse on gun control erupted, as it does whenever there is a gun massacre. Paddock had committed the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, overtaking the 2016 Orlando shooting at the Pulse nightclub.
The public was in shock. Paddock, a 64-yearold rich, white retiree, didn’t fit the profile of a typical shooter. Why did he do it? The media dug into Paddock’s life. They discovered that he was an antisocial gambling addict. His father was once on the FBI’s most wanted list. He had prescriptions for Diazepam, an anti-anxiety drug. They’re still trying to find a motive for why Paddock decided to commit the massacre; currently, Paddock’s brain is being analyzed for mental disorders.
All this should sound familiar. Whenever there’s a mass shooting, we think about gun control and frame our debate around gun control—rightfully so. Not often enough do we analyze shootings as a self-influencing trend. Malcolm Gladwell likened the phenomenon of mass shootings to that of a riot, a situation in which normal people are influenced by others to commit acts of destructive violence. To explain this connection, Gladwell looked to the theories of sociologist Mark Granovetter, who thought it was a mistake to look at riots as individual acts. He saw riots as a social process and believed that people have “thresholds,” barriers to committing acts of violence that they wouldn’t otherwise, barriers that they are willing to overstep when they have seen enough people commit the act.
[pullquote]Not often enough do we analyze shootings as a self-influencing trend.[/pullquote]
Granovetter’s theory runs against how we cover mass shootings. We dig into the personal histories of the perpetrators of shootings to understand them, individualizing their motives and influences. Adam Lanza had severe mental health issues and played violent video games; Elliott Rodger was racist and misogynistic; Omar Mateen was influenced both by ISIS and a rejection of his attraction towards other men.
News cycles like to focus on and uncover the stories behind each shooting individually, but they spend little time discussing how shootings beget shootings. For example, both the Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook shooters were influenced by the Columbine shooting.
News outlets don’t often think of the role they play in shootings. We talk about how lethal each shooting was. The way we choose to cover shootings encourages potential shooters to commit future crimes. There was an emphasis with the Orlando shooting in 2016 and the Las Vegas shooting now on how both were, at their time, the deadliest mass shooting in the US. We talk about the methods by which the shooters planned their crimes: how far in advance they started planning, what weapons they used, how they carried out the shootings. We talk about the shooters’ lives—the media essentially writes a biography for them. It’s important to recognize that talking about how bad a shooting was and how the shooters carried out their crimes are necessary to draw urgency to gun control, public safety, mental health, and other issues. But at the same time, the way we portray shootings in the media gives shooters an incredible amount of agency. Potential shooters are drawn to this power.
[pullquote]The way we portray shootings in the media gives shooters an incredible amount of agency.[/pullquote]
What can we change about the way shootings are covered in the media? A possible answer may lie in the way suicides are covered. Although they might seem unrelated, shootings and suicides are similar in two respects. First, both involve those who aren’t in a right state of mind. Mentally healthy people don’t try to commit mass murder or end their own lives. Second, both shootings and suicides are contagious. Hearing about them makes susceptible people more likely to attempt them.
Suicide contagion following highly publicized accounts of suicides was an issue for a long time. In 1962, following the probable suicide of Marilyn Monroe, the suicide rate in the US increase by 12 percent when compared to the rate in months prior. The increase in suicides following highly publicized reporting of them eventually led to suicide prevention advocates establishing guidelines on how to cover suicides, with focal points being to avoid dramatizing the suicide, and to avoid portraying suicide as a solution to problems.
[pullquote]There are things the media can do to reduce the amount of people committing shootings.[/pullquote]
The biggest takeaway from the suicide prevention guidelines is that there are things the media can do to reduce the number of people committing shootings. Suicide rates decrease when news reports covering them focus less on how a person went about their suicide attempt and “succeeded” or “failed,” and instead try to raise important issues such as depression. For shootings, the most crucial step media can take is the same: stop covering the personal lives of shooters so much and instead focus on the shooting itself, and more importantly, the issues the shooting raises. Stop trying to dig into Paddock’s life—if we want to talk about mental health and shootings, we should do it in a broader context. By doing so, hopefully we can prevent a tragedy such as Las Vegas from occurring ever again.
Tommy Yu ‘17 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at tommy.t.yu@wustl.edu.