Researchers confirm existence of ripple effect after mass shooting violence Tragic case study of Kahramanmaraş school shootings

A string of deadly school shootings in southeastern Türkiye has left the country in shock. The more deadlier attack of the two, which became the first mass school shooting recorded in the country, came just one day after a separate incident in the same region, where a former student opened fire in another school, injuring 16 people before taking his own life.

The frequency of these back-to-back attacks has only compounded the national grief and raised serious concerns about whether mass shootings inspire more violence to follow.

A 14-year-old student killed nine people — eight fellow students and a teacher — and wounded at least 13 others in the Kahramanmaraş region on April 15.

“There have been two attacks, in a very short period, both in cities with lower incomes,” Professor Asli Carkoglu, an expert in adolescent psychology, told the BBC. “These things do have a way of spreading.”

She warned that such incidents could become “an example for young minds that are frustrated enough,” highlighting fears that exposure to violence may inspire copycat behaviour.

Tragically, her concerns are valid, as a growing body of research conducted in the US, where mass shootings, especially among school children, have become a regular part of their news cycles, seems to confirm these fears.

Researchers point to what is known as the “contagion effect” — a theory suggesting that mass shootings can occur in clusters, often influenced by media coverage and imitation.

What drives copycat behaviour in violent crimes

The concept of contagion has been studied for decades, with research indicating that the likelihood of a similar attack increases in the days following a mass shooting. A 2015 study by Arizona State University found that a second mass shooting is statistically more likely to occur within roughly 13 days of an initial attack.

The phenomenon has been observed in the United States, where mass shootings have occurred in close succession. In May 2022, a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 children and two teachers took place just 10 days after another attack in Buffalo that left 10 people dead in a supermarket.

"Despite gun violence being a fairly common type of crime in the US due to lax gun regulations and other factors, another 14 mass shootings, which are defined as shootings in which four or more people are hit, took place in the span of those few days between the two mentioned incidents, which shook even American researchers."

Experts say perpetrators are often motivated by a desire for recognition. Jaclyn Schildkraut, an associate professor at the State University of New York Oswego, supports efforts to limit media attention on attackers.

“Attackers want people to know who they are, they want their name recognition, and so when we remove that incentive and we don’t report their names, we aren’t rewarding people for killing other people by making them celebrities,” she said. “It’s also removing the incentive for other like-minded individuals who may be seeing the amount of coverage that a case is getting and want similar attention.”

While the contagion effect appears strongest in high-casualty attacks, researchers note it is less evident in smaller-scale incidents, possibly because they receive less sustained attention and therefore generate less imitation.

Research also suggests that attackers frequently study earlier incidents. Authorities investigating the Kahramanmaraş attack say the suspect had referenced previous mass killers online, including an American gunman, Elliot Rodgers, who killed six students in California in 2014. They also say an entry on his computer, dated 11 April, indicated there would be a major attack "in the near future".

In recent years, mass shootings in the US have grown “substantially more deadly over time,” according to a 2020 report by Adam Lankford, a criminologist at the University of Alabama. Perpetrators often draw inspiration from earlier attacks, applying tactics or lessons from past incidents. Since 2010, the number of mass shootings resulting in eight or more deaths has doubled compared with the previous four decades.

Lankford also found that the share of attackers influenced by prior perpetrators has increased significantly. Between 1966 and 2009, about a quarter of the deadliest shootings were carried out by individuals who directly cited, referenced or studied earlier mass killers. Between 2010 and 2019, that proportion rose to roughly half.

According to Lankford,  the rise of social media has made it easier to trace such influences.

“We’re increasingly able to study the social media and internet searches of the perpetrators themselves, so what was in previous decades mere speculation about transmission can now be confirmed,” he said. “So, as just one example, we know what the Parkland shooter was googling and that he was looking up both things like the Virginia Tech shooting or the Columbine shooters, but then also a shooting that had just occurred several weeks earlier.”

By Nazrin Sadigova