How news media can help prevent shooting massacres

There is no mystery about school killings. The real causes are staring us in the face; criminological research demonstrates that these are copycat crimes.

Notice how they echo and change the storylines of past crimes: locations were in the 1980s post offices, then became gun-free schools and malls; perpetrators were first PLO terrorists, then aging males with relationship issues and in recent years mentally unstable young men.

Research in the USA showed that the mainstream news media provide training manuals for copycats, with their inset boxes listing weapons in 'arsenals'; they refer to the killers' 'meticulous planning' while laying out easy bullet-point lists of actions leading up to the crimes. The killers he researched kept articles from Time and Newsweek, and obsessively watched news and current affairs reports on how they could easily get guns to commit massacres. Now they turn to NBC, CNN and ABC and the online media. The news shows, not computer games or violent movies, are the most effective teachers of mass killing.

We understand now that people build maps or scripts of how to act from what they see others around them doing. The more alike someone seems, the more their situation can be applied to yours, the more likely it is you will act like them. This applies to choice of fashions and musical tastes, choosing education options - and to committing crimes. News people know this and enforce internal guidelines to help prevent suicide and crime copycats. But for a mass shooting, the urgent opportunity to boost audiences and present copy overwhelms their ethical hesitation, and they convince themselves their carefully-preened moral outrage is a force for good.

But they don't stop there. The responsible news media provide billions of dollars in name recognition, photo publicity and hours of discussion about the significance of the killings and their perpetrators. They partner with political activists, fomenting hatred of the journalists' political enemies and creating moral campaigns to punish them. Their actions invest the killers with a huge social significance, that these mentally unstable, morally deficient losers would never otherwise achieve.

Detailed news 'instruction' has taught even the mentally handicapped how; and enormous social significance is guaranteed if they act. Our news services created the string of mass murders, and made an engine to keep it going.

News reporters are not the only ones causing the massacres. What kind of people are ready at a moment's notice to profit from mass killings? Who are the people who write the copy for them, who stand in front of their cameras and gravely incite moral outrage at whole classes of political enemies? The news media have formed strong and profitable partnerships with pet activists.

In Australia, gun control activism started in the late 1970s. Activists quickly partnered with journalists sensationalizing and editorializing gun violence. Their influence grew and the activists brought the American fashion for gun control into the Australian media scene. A string of massacres started; the initiating event of massacres in Australia was the 1984 bikie gang ambush called by media the Milperra Massacre, a stupid private melée that left seven dead including an innocent bystander. The stage was set for Australian copycats, and (depending what you count), over the next 12 years the Australian media taught more than a dozen violent losers who actually committed massacres.

In October 1995 a current affairs team joined activists from the National Coalition for Gun Control and Greenpeace. They carefully detailed how to buy guns illegally, demonstrating every step with an attractive spokes-model. They showed how easy it could be to use the guns, then blew apart a melon like a victim's head. Then a prominent activist framed our fear as destiny: "We are going to have a massacre in Tasmania!' Six months later, the Police asked Martin Bryant when he bought his assault rifle. The answer: 'About five months ago.'

This program was explicitly named by the Coroner as the cause of at least one other death – that of a Melbourne man who travelled to Tasmania, bought a gun as taught by the program, and killed himself. A journalist asked the NCGC activist, whose words may have triggered the killings, about this verdict and he lashed out with bitter hostility.

There is a very obvious imitative trigger in mass killings, after the training phase of media communication to the prospective killer. It is quite usual that intensive media for one massacre is immediately rewarded by another, and for several smaller attacks to be foiled in the weeks after. The trigger for the Port Arthur killings was the unprecedented media coverage of the Dunblane killings of schoolchildren. No news editor or current affairs producer has ever been held to account for the massacres, yet the connection in timing is obvious.

John Howard led the moralizers of Australian media and politics, a lynch mob against the people who didn't do the crime. For three years it seemed any 'nice' person talking about guns had to say 'I hate guns as much as anybody, but…' before they could relate how normal life had involved guns. At the Sydney Olympics, shooters won the first gold medals and ordinary Australians got over political correctness in the glow of national pride and camaraderie.

One voice kept at the public as most of Australia returned to productive issues, having crushed the shooters. Lee Rhiannon had grabbed hold of the fact that handguns, far more tightly controlled than long guns ever were, were still available if you jumped through the many hoops to get a license. Sympathetic journalists in a national broadcaster gave her a platform to claim, falsely, that handguns were easy to get. This led many to go through the tedious process to get legal guns, which filters out almost all irresponsibles. One foreign student took her advice, and although he was a bit weird a shooting club supported him; anecdotal evidence suggests that was partly out of fear of being accused of racism.

In late 2002 the media went nuts over the Washington sniper killings. Weeks of media hysteria over guns combined with this student's mental illness and personal crises. At the height of the Washington Beltway sniper headlines, he shot seven people at Monash University. A similar pattern had been followed; the news media with activist partners write stories about guns being easy to get, and so more people get them; then news media provide massacres as potent examples and publicity rewards to people who go on to kill.

Now killers send publicity packages with photos, video and manifestos to media directly, and news editors confirm their complicity in the killings by using those publicity pictures and stories.

The tools to break the cycle of killings already exist, in the guidelines used to stop copycat suicides. When you break them, as NineMSN did for the jumping suicide of a pretty newsreader, the chain of imitations can lead far and wide. Within 24 hours a woman jumped from a building in West Perth, killing her child; later a woman jumped from West Gate Bridge, killing her children too; later still a man threw his daughter to her death from that bridge, but stopped short and spared the lives of his other children.

For massacres, called parasuicide events, the guidelines are clear and likely to be effective. They are:

· Move massacre and suicide stories to lower prominence. Below the fold, further back, later in the bulletin, fewer words, without longwinded or detailed special reports.

· Do not glamorise or demonise the actions of the perpetrators. Use the passive voice to make them less interesting.

· Do not provide glamorous people as action models; do not use pictures that the perpetrator provides. Choose pictures that diminish rather than glorify their self-image.

· Do not use words that might encourage people to think their own life patterns are similar to those of the perpetrators; emphasize the uniqueness of mental illnesses and situations of individuals.

· Provide counter-suicide behavior guides, such as a hotline to call or quotes from groups that work with people at risk.

· Do not emphasize the tools and methods of suicides or mass killings.

And one more that is badly needed for media and police:

· Don't teach passive compliance as though the killer might not hurt you if you do what they want, or as though the authorities will be in time to help you. Teach people how to seize the initiative to save lives.

Until our media adopt guidelines like these, copycat mass killings will continue.