Almost every week, on any given news media outlet, you hear about a student murdering one or more of their classmates.

There seems to be no solution to this massive problem that plagues us, but there has been some talk about how an overabundance of media coverage creates “copycat” killings.

I personally do not believe this is the problem at hand. There are too many other factors that come into play, not including the fact that a lot of these school killings are triggered by some form of bullying or depression.

If they see someone else on the news doing it, I don’t think that any sane person  would want to imitate the violence.

When media outlets emphasize the killer, it disregards the feeling of the families of the victims. Some people refuse to say the name of shooters, like sheriff John Hanlin during his news conference discussing the Oregon shooting at Umpqua Community College.

Not naming the shooter doesn’t necessarily help the situation, and even if it did, there’s no background data to prove that it is an effective method in deterring shooters from their 15 minutes of fame.

Understanding why these things happen are completely separate from publicizing the killer.

If information is being suppressed, it can turn into people who are uninformed merely guessing.

The press should act appropriately and with morals, not glorifying the killer.

The job of the media is to give information to the public, hopefully with no bias included based off of the events that took place.

There should be no emphasis placed on the killer, but rather an emphasis placed on the solution to the problem, and what resources could be created or used to fix that problem.

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.