Current Event: “Mass Killings Are Seen as a Kind of Contagion”
Shootings in schools. Shootings on live television. Shootings in the streets. Shooters!!!! Have you lost your mind at the uncivilized violence you’re creating? Obviously not. The article “mass Killings Are Kind of Contagious”, from the New York Times is about how major mass killers influence others to be like themselves. Some rookie shooters, or whatever you’d like to call them, more than likely extol these other shooters and recognize how social media blasts news articles, pictures, and information all over the place. What sick twisted mind would want to be famous for killing people? Who really knows. Some people who have studied all of these shootings have begun to figure out that many factors, including mental illness’, guide these shooters to actually cause corruption. In fact, some mass shootings are even influenced by the mental illness. The fact that there are crazy people out there killing innocent kids, means that there is also a high chance that someone in my community or school could easily pull out a gun and shoot everyone that gets in their way. Mass shootings affect me because in any given time, I could be put in the horrid situation where I could be the one looking down the barrel of the gun. Hopefully I won’t have to experience anything like that, but if I were, I don’t even know what I would do. All of these mass shootings are affecting the way some wanna-be-shooters think. The way that news reporters and social media gives attention to mass shooters, makes the wanna-be’s crave that same kind of attention and what they think is ‘fame.’ “If you blast the names and the faces of shooters on news stations and constantly repeat their names, there may be an inadvertent process of creating a blueprint.” Dr. Deborah Weisbrot said in an interview. I believe that if we changed the way these mass shootings are covered on television or social media, the amount of mass shootings could decrease. Why are these shootings so contagious? The world may never know.