In Port Huron, Mich., schools were shut for several days after a bomb was found in a middle school. Four students there were arrested for concocting a mass-murder plot. In Alaska, a boy brought a stolen .44 Magnum pistol to his middle school. A New Hampshire high school received a threat hours before Tipper Gore arrived to discuss the Columbine massacre. Despite the proliferation of trouble at schools this spring, yesterday was the first time since the Littleton shootings that students actually have been injured.
Researchers say copycat behavior extends far beyond youngsters and their schools.
It's been documented dating back to Jack the Ripper. Berkowitz has found spikes in violent crime, for example, in the month after the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and after the 1966 arrest of Richard Speck for killing eight student nurses in Chicago. Such crime booms, Berkowitz said, are fueled in part by the intense news coverage surrounding such events, which primes people already inclined toward aggression. They don't only report the news. They make the news.