The Copycat Effect?

Loren Coleman asks the question in his latest post at his blog-site
Twilight Language
Aurora Halloween Mask  
"How would you feel if a kid showed up at your door with this mask on for Halloween, trick or treating?"

 

 He is also the author of a book called The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines

He may have a point.
I saw this movie last year at the cinema with my son Kevin, ironically enough, and I'm glad to say that my Kevin is the exact opposite to this Kevin in the movie ... unless he is just good at hiding bodies;-)
If you haven't seen this film I have to warn you that it is not a movie that will make you come out whistling 
It's a Wonderful World ... unless you are as sick as this boy in the movie.
You feel more like you've just been involved in a minor car accident.

 I just watched the movie The Raven about Edgar Allan Poe's stories being used against him by a copy-cat killer.
Which brings up the question, is it just movies that trigger these things, or is it video games, books, comics, magazines, news stories, TV, music clips, internet sites ... such as Loren's and even this post here on my blog? 
Or would these sick people just find some other way to murder innocent people anyway?

How much effect do media stories have on these kinds of wackos?

 I stumbled across this clip of the trailer from the Heath Ledger movie 10 Things I Hate About You when I was looking into  
Joseph Gordon-Levitt films with my sync-head mates at this post -
The Clock and the Cat 
I was amazed at the themes running through  
10 Things I Hate About You and We Need To Talk About Kevin.
* SPOILER ALERT*
Kevin goes on a rampage through his school with a bow and arrow, there is an opening scene in We Need To Talk About Kevin  where his mother is in a tomato fight, which implants the parallel thought in your head about a massacre later in the movie.
There is a paintball fight in 10 Things... and a scene where the future Joker is chased through the school grounds by security guards for blasting the school with his mouth :-) 

The bottom clip is a parody of Ledger's singing scene from a movie called Not Another Teen Movie.

 Loren does raise some interesting questions on his site, and I can't say that I have read his book ... but is his study part of the solution, or just another part of the problem?

Another blogger Mike Clelland wrote a spooky post 
The Death of Jessica Redfield
where one of the victims of the Aurora shooting was involved in a similar tomato fight as the mother  in "...Kevin".
She had escaped one shooting in Canada months before, only to be killed in another one at cinema watching The Dark Knight Rises. 

 One thing that can't be denied is that there are a lot of mixed signals when an American Psycho can also wear the mask of Bat(e)man.