If it bleeds, it leads…

And apparently, it can pay dividends: School shootings beget more school shootings. And unlike the days of Parkway South — which I bet you never heard of unless you knew somebody who was there — news coverage may be why. From the CNN article:

Researchers gathered records of school shootings and mass killings from several data sets and fit them into a mathematical “contagion model.” The spread they found was not dependent on location, leading researchers to believe that national media coverage of a mass shooting might play a role.

If you’re the kind of person who prefers to look at the research rather than the media coverage of it, good for you: here it is. Left to your imagination is whether other crimes might be subject to the “contagion model” described by the researchers. My guess is “probably.”

In Closing: dinosaur feathers; apparently he had a heart after all (no loss); stand and deliver all your ideologues.