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I don't think they're doing it consciously to become famous, but out of feelings of inadequacy/lack of agency/bitterness/etc., which subconsciously turns into fame-seeking to try to resolve that. But I have no deep psychological insights here; I've thought about the tactical and trauma care side, but treating the incidents as random events works perfectly well for that.

However, pro for your argument, there is some reporting bias -- we hear about school shootings for days, but we rarely hear about suicides, or murder/suicides, which are far more common; even things like the Sikh temple murders went out of the news in a day or two. Schools are just particularly likely to get coverage and stay in the news.

But if ending the media deification of spree killers converts some of them back into simple suicides, that's a win, really. On the other hand, it seems to have channeled them into a local maximum of "pretend like you're playing Call of Duty, without any real skill or training" -- I'd be a lot more afraid of a halfway competent chemist with no tactical experience deciding to go the full McVeigh, vs. trying to play soldier. I'm personally pretty comfortable with a rifle, but if my goal were mass casualties, it'd be bombs or other technology based attacks for sure.

> And of course, we had the Newtown shooter who didn't leave behind any notes, manifestos, or in fact any evidence that he wanted to be infamous (even if posthumously).

He left plenty of evidence that pretty much guaranteed he'd be infamous. Nothing will do that like several dozen dead bodies. Notes and manifestos are optional.

These assholes may have many different drives but the one thing they seem to have in common is that they pick their targets to guarantee that they will become notorious. Stomping on an ant hill will kill many more but won't put you on CNN.

Apropos CNN, the one thing the media could do with cases like these is to restrain themselves in the way they cover these incidents. I'm pretty sure there is a large element of copy-cat behaviour in here that could potentially be reduced by the amount of media coverage given.

> He left plenty of evidence that pretty much guaranteed he'd be infamous.

You seem to be confusing cause and effect.

He more likely chose his target because his mother worked there. Even if every shooter is choosing randomly we will only talk about the "media seeking" ones the news covers.

He shot a few more people than just his mother. He could have done that at home. All of these shooters have chosen a target they had some relation to, either they went to the school or they had some other prior history with it.

Still, the decision to attack the school, it's students and not simply one individual is why we are hearing about these.

>He left plenty of evidence that pretty much guaranteed he'd be infamous. Nothing will do that like several dozen dead bodies.

That's circular reasoning. You're reusing evidence in a way that does not check out.

Let me try again: if he had stomped on an anthill to vent his anger you wouldn't have heard about it.

The media decide who gets to be (in)famous and by behaving in a certain way you can get your 15 minutes. Behaving in this particular way pretty much guarantees that. The link between gore and media coverage is firmly established by now so even if in the first few cases you could have said 'that's circular reasoning' after several such cycles you can no longer tell cause from effect.

Hence copycat crimes and other stupidities.

All it took for dumb, angry children to be set on this path was the attention given to the Columbine shooters. Quite a few of these idiots - if not all of them - think those guys were heroes and perceive the media attention given to them (movies, incessant press coverage) as positive.

They want that for themselves to compensate for some perceived inferiority or other shortcoming and so they go the same route.

I think today it is safe to assume that a hunger for fame is at least a component in these shootings.

I can easily imagine that "hunger for fame" is a component in these shootings, but that's not the same thing as "I have evidence to support" or even "is likely."

It's not necessarily to gain notoriety. But there is such a thing as copycat. So reporting about people committing shootings is more likely to cause more shootings. I remember an episode of Newswipe, where a psychologist urged media to:

a) keep the news of violence to local community only b) do not glorify the attacker by negatively praising him (like a ninja, moved quickly...) or showing him in positions of power (brandishing guns or wearing clothes that hide his face) c) telling how many people he killed.

Each time one of those news is broadcast, he added, they see a spike in violence. And it seems consistent with how humans regularly behave.

Evidence please, not just "consistency" and remembering a tv program.

I didn't find much but here is some:

* http://cad.sagepub.com/content/48/1/46

* http://books.google.rs/books?hl=en&lr=&id=3B4lTTZE58...

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contagion

They are cited as references on this page:

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_crime

As for other evidence, you'd need to look at crimes and if there is a large number of similar attempts of violence (not necessarily school, but overall mass shootings), grouped around highly prominent cases covered by media. That kind of research and evidence is sadly outside my scope. I'm not sure where you'd find sources, nor how to process them statistically correct.

>Given what we know of spree shooters around the world and in the US, they strike me as predominantly desperate, mentally ill people.

No, we mostly know them in the US, by an order of magnitude more than other western countries. The same with serial killers: the US is up there with some third world nations for more prolific killers, and unsurpassed for total serial killer count, so much that Wikipedia devotes its own page to US serial killers which is larger than the sum page for the rest of the world.

And, desperate, mentally ill people? Could also be the products of a desperate, mentally ill society.

    > So much that Wikipedia devotes its own page to US serial killers.

Aside from any of this Wikipedia devotes a lot of pages to US-specific things because it has a lot of contributors in the US. You shouldn't draw any other conclusion from it than that. You'll see a lot of US-bias and US-specific coverage on any topic on the English Wikipedia.

Another option is that they are the products of a dysfunctional medical system. In particular, a pretty common recurring feature is that the shooters turn out to have been on antidepressants which are known to cause aggression and/or suicidal tendencies.

I'm confident that the US cannot hold a candle to Germany, Russia, Cambodia, Bosnia, etc., when it comes to prolific murdering. If you only want to consider individual / non-cooperating killers, they exist in similar proportion across most societies.

Hello? Someone was claiming the same about other Western countries, so I compiled these lists of mass shooting events in Western Europe in just this century:

From Wikipedia, school shootings in Europe in this century, last two numbers are killed and wounded:

  R., Georg, 18, Sep. 17 2009, Germany, 0, 10-15
  Kretschmer, Tim, 17, March 11, 2009, Germany, 15, 9-13
  De Gelder, Kim, 20, Jan. 16/23,, 2009, Belgium, 4, 12
  Saari, Matti Juhani, 22, Sep. 23, 2008, Finland, 10, 1-3
  Auvinen, Pekka-Eric, 18, Nov. 7, 2007, Jokela, Finland, 8, 1
  Bosse, Bastian, 18, Nov. 20, 2006, Germany, 0, 22
  Steinhäuser, Robert, 19, April 26, 2002, Germany, 16 1

Other spree shooting in Europe in this century:

  Merah, Mohammed, 23,  March 11–22, 2012, Toulouse & Montauban, France, 7, 8
  Amrani, Nordine, 33,  Dec. 13, 2011, Liège, Belgium, 6, 123 (he also used grenades)
  Breivik, Anders Behring, 32, July 22, 2011, Norway, 75, 242 (a bomb killed 8)
  van der Vlis, Tristan, 24, April 9, 2011, Netherlands, 6, 17
  Radmacher, Sabine, 41, Sep. 19, 2010, Germany, 3, 18 (arson was also used)
  Bird, Derrick, 52, June 2, 2010, United Kingdom, 12, 11
  Sacco, Angelo Secondo, 54, June 28, 2005, Italy, 3, 9
  Antonello, Mauro, 40,  Oct. 15, 2002, Italy, 7
  Durn, Richard, 33,  March 27, 2002, France, 8, 19
  Selamet, Ozan, 42,  Jan. 18, 2002, Belgium, 6 (2 strangled)
  Roux-Durrafourt, Jean-Pierre, 44,  Oct. 29, 2001, France, 4, 7
  Leibacher, Friedrich, 57, Sep. 27, 2001, Switzerland, 14, 18
  Kaya, Hakan, 24,  Dec. 22, 2000, Germany, 6