In the past three months alone, there have been nine school shootings in the media spotlight, and major media outlets consistently frame them as an incidents revolving around either gun control or mental disabilities.

It seems like every time someone turns on the television to watch CNN the headlines are blaring about a young person shooting up his or her school. Ironically, this very media coverage is partly to blame.

Statistics gathered by Plos One (“Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings”) demonstrate that the issue lies in the propagation of shootings via the media. This is likely true, even if the media blames it on mental issues and lack of gun control laws.

The fame that a shooter gets in media coverage is similar to that of a celebrity: it’s all about that person. There is a certain appeal to it that some young people — in which I am referring to the average student at schools — believe it could fix their problems, which generally consist of simple, everyday issues that everyone experiences.

This is the effect of what criminologists refer to as “self-excitation contagion” in which people tend to shoot up schools because they know — due to media coverage — that they can get away with the crime and that schools have a vulnerability they can exploit. This is true in both social matters and criminal matters. (“Self-Exciting Process Modeling of Crime”)

Even if a person is mentally unstable, for one, gun control laws are not going to stop someone who made that decision from getting those materials (also a fundamental law of the “Self-Exciting Process), and blaming their mental illness is avoiding the root of the issue.

The mass media needs to stop putting the spotlight on individuals that shoot up schools and making them look like celebrities. It normalizes the situation for other people to feel this is how to direct the attention that they seek.