Shooting Season

Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin asks whether school shootings, such as the one Monday in Amish country can be charted, and links a suicide-prevention researcher and author named Loren Coleman, who says yes, and watch out for more mid-month.

On his blog, Coleman, author of Suicide Cluster and The Copycat Effect,  writes that most of today's school shootings occur during the beginning and end of the school year. Copycat attacks strike on anniversaries - whether it's a day, a week, a month, a year or ten years later. School shooters often imitate previous incidents - often down to specific details. "Celebrity" events, such as the Columbine shootings "have a far-reaching impact and modeling effect."

School shooters, he says, are suicidal, more than homicidal. Coleman, who spend much of his career in science as a cryptozoologist, aludes to a Secret Service study to support his thesis.

Until two recent shootings, the post-1996 model was for a student to kill fellow students. Before that, it was outsiders entering school and killing students.

Coleman recaps the school year so far:

The Aug. 24, shooting in Essex, Vt (two teachers killed, two more wounded - all female. The male shooter was wounded by his own gunshot.)

Aug. 29 in Hillsborough, N.C. (father of shooter killed, two students wounded in Columbine copycat.)

Sept. 7 in Paris, France. (16-year-old boy emptied shotgun inside a school, injuring a teacher and student.)

Sept. 13, Dawson College, Montreal (one student killed, 10 others hurt, by Columbine-obsessed shooter who killed himself.)

Sept. 14, Green Bay, Misc. (police, tipped by a student, arrested students and recovered sawed-off shotguns, automatic weapons, pistols, ammo.

Sept. 27, Bailey, Colo., (54-year-old-man walks into an English classroom and takes six young women hostage, sexually assaulting some. Kills one hostage before police kill him.)

Sept. 29, Cazenovia, Wisc. (recently expelled student brings shotgun to school, loses it in a struggle, then kills principal with a handgun.)

Coleman writes:

Please note that the lone male "outsider shooter" is a common denominator here, as well as most of the victims being females or authority figures (teachers, administrators). Also, there exists a clear and concentrated repeating pattern of Wednesdays and/or Thursdays, since August 24th.

I would watch Wednesday, October 11 (four weeks exactly) through Friday, October 13 (the month-by-date), the anniversary period, which is a "month" from the Dawson College shootings. There will also be another dangerous "hot window" for a next wave of school shootings. A month from the Colorado-Wisconsin events of September 27-29, at the end of October, could be a time in which people must keep their guard up and on high alert.

In general, of course, we seem to now be in an unfortunate high copycat effect pattern, and it could be a deadly time for students in North America, as well as internationally, for several weeks, no matter what the day or date.

all i have to say is, do you realize that students read the paper, both online and in paper.  

yes. but there is a strong public-safety purpose to posts like Coleman's.

While I don't think a blog post is going to make someone decide to shoot up a school, I'm also not sure what public-safety message I can take from "it could be a deadly time for students in North America, as well as internationally, for several weeks, no matter what the day or date."

I can't watch my kids 24 hours a day, and turning their schools into prisons on the off chance that "it could be a deadly time" may keep them alive but doesn't strike me as the best learning environment.

Not to lessen how awful these shootings are, but they are still relatively rare. Other than their having a solid security plan, I'm not sure what else schools can do without going into full-time lockdown. The fact of the matter is that if someone with a bunch of guns wants to get into a school, it's going to be hard to stop them. We can't constantly live in fear on the slim chance of that happening.

well, you picked a particularly vague sentence to quote. what about the several before that?

I can see Mark's point.  Are parents supposed to keep their kids home from school at the end of October?
And, what good is "being on high alert" going to do an Amish school?

Living in fear is what terrorism is all about.  The guys with the guns do a lot more planning than the people at the schools.

After a while, the "hot window" dates start looking like charts people use to plan which lottery numbers to play.
Can deranged people be that predictable?  They're deranged, after all.