Regarding the recent spate of school shootings: why is it that the media are (or pretend to be) the last to understand copycat crimes that are”caused” less by social conditions or psychosis than by watching or reading the media? Simply, when a certain crime takes the same form in disparate places, the perpetrators are learning from the same source. This was true of the Newark riots of 1967, the riots in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, and too much since. Only when readers wise up will the media folk do likewise.
