CBC TV: Are school shootings connected?
Date: Oct 3, 2006 9:29 AM
PUBLICATION: CBC Television – The National
DATE: 2006.10.02
TIME: 22:00 EDT
WORD COUNT: 552

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[- Across North America, it's the fourth school shooting in less than a
month. Are they connected? We'll tell you about the copycat effect. -
All day long, as disturbing]

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PETER MANSBRIDGE (HOST):

- Across North America, it’s the fourth school shooting in less than a
month. Are they connected? We’ll tell you about the copycat effect. –

All day long, as disturbing images came in from Nickel Mines, experts in
criminal behaviour were watching closely, looking for a pattern,
clusters of killings and connections made by unstable minds. Ioanna
Roumeliotis has that part of the story.

IOANNA ROUMELIOTIS (REPORTER):

When a lone gunman stormed Montreal’s Dawson College last month and
started firing, he was likely following a pattern set long before he
pulled the trigger. This is not a portrait of an original thinker, and
most likely Kimveer Gill inspired a slew of others to follow in his
bloody footsteps.

LOREN COLEMAN (SCIENTIST):

With school shootings, because the media is so pervasive, we’re now
having global school shootings.

IOANNA ROUMELIOTIS (REPORTER):

Since the Dawson shootings, there have been three other shootings at
three other schools in the United States. Experts say that is no
coincidence. School shootings seem to occur in clusters, and like the
spread of a contagious disease, one shooter seems to feed off the other.
Loren Coleman has been tracking the copycat effect for 30 years and
writes about it at length in his latest book. He says witnessing or
reading about a violent crime or suicide can pass the idea along to
someone else.

LOREN COLEMAN (SCIENTIST):

And it’s a real behaviour contagion situation that has been proven with
over 30 years of research and studies in which people followed celebrity
suicides and school shootings and workplace rampages.

IOANNA ROUMELIOTIS (REPORTER):

The shootings at Dawson became a headline story around the globe, and
very likely, experts say, left someone with a germ of a similar idea to
the same. Two weeks after Dawson, a 53-year-old gunman took six girls
hostage in a school in Bailey, Colorado. He sexually assaulted them
before killing a 16-year-old girl and himself. Two days after that, a
recently expelled 15-year-old student shot his former principal in the
head. Now today’s shootings in Pennsylvania, just four days later.
Jordan Peterson tracks patterns of violence at the University of
Toronto.

JORDAN PETERSON (PSYCHOLOGIST):

They want to produce as much unnecessary pain and suffering as possible
in the shortest period of time. That’s why they go after innocent
people.

IOANNA ROUMELIOTIS (REPORTER):

The latest spate of school shootings are not the first cluster. Dating
from the late 1970s, there have been dozens of school shootings, most of
them in the United States, and most have occurred in groups, one closely
following the other, some just days apart. After the Columbine shootings
on April 20th, 1999, there were four school shootings that year alone,
including the shooting in Taber, Alberta, that occurred just eight days
later. Peterson says a twisted sense of notoriety fuels these people.

JORDAN PETERSON (PSYCHOLOGIST):

The simplest thing to do to stop the copycat aspect of the killing would
be to never publish the names of the killers.

IOANNA ROUMELIOTIS (REPORTER):

By his own online accounts, the Dawson shooter had grandiose visions of
himself and was a fan of a video game modelled after the Columbine
shootings, and experts say he himself was probably a copycat inspired by
four other less publicized school shootings that occurred just weeks
before in the U.S. and France. The chilling reality, these guys are as
predictable as they are dangerous. Ioanna Roumeliotis, CBC News,
Toronto.