APA: Stop Airing Graphic Cho Materials

Of course, my question to the American Psychiatric Association is...what took you so long?


APA Urges Media To Stop Airing Graphic Cho Materials
  
Today [28 Apr 2007] the American Psychiatric Association (APA) sent an open letter to the news media urging them to stop airing the disturbing writings, photographs and video that NBC News reportedly received from Cho Seung-Hui, who committed suicide after murdering 32 students and faculty and wounding at least 29 others at Virginia Tech.

The letter was signed by APA President Pedro Ruiz, M.D., and contained two enclosures: a World Health Organization report, entitled "Preventing Suicide: A Resource for Media Professionals," and a study from American Behavioral Scientist, entitled "Media Contagion and Suicide among the Young" "Media Contagion and Suicide among the Young" and authored by Madelyn Gould, Ph.D., of Columbia University and colleagues. The full text of the letter is as follows:

On behalf of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and our 38,000 physician members specializing in the diagnosis, treatment, prevention and research of mental illnesses, I urge all news media outlets to stop airing the disturbing writings, photographs and video that NBC News reportedly received from Cho Seung-Hui, who committed suicide after murdering 32 students and faculty and wounding at least 29 others at Virginia Tech.

The publicity of the Cho materials not only seems insensitive to the grieving and traumatized families, friends and peers of those murdered and injured, but also seriously jeopardizes the public's safety by potentially inciting "copycat" suicides, homicides and other incidents. Because the scientific evidence in this area is clear, the World Health Organization, in its 2000 report "Preventing Suicide: A Resource for Media Professionals," said: "Glorifying suicide victims as martyrs and objects of public adulation may suggest to susceptible persons that their society honours suicidal behaviour." Indeed, it is evident to many that the Columbine tragedy was a powerful force in Mr. Cho's writings. The media have an important role to play in limiting the power of such tragedies by choosing not to sensationalize them.

Some media have declined to publicize Mr. Cho's materials - a decision we applaud. However, some outlets, including NBC News, continue to use the materials. NBC News issued a statement yesterday in which it announced that, after thorough review, it has "limited our usage of the video across NBC News, including MSNBC, to no more than 10 percent of our airtime." While we trust this action was undertaken with the best of intentions, allowing the Cho materials to continue to constitute 10 percent of airtime demonstrates a lack of understanding of the potential impact the video and audio could have.

The massacre at Virginia Tech is newsworthy and it is the media's job to report on it, but we believe the media have a responsibility to balance the public's need to know against the potential danger of provoking copycat behavior. The APA urges, for the public good, that all media cease airing the graphic Cho materials.

Their press release url: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=69111

Student Hostage Nearly Immolated

Did you know there was a violent school incident on April 24, 2007, only a week and a day after what happened in Blacksburg, Virginia?

An intriguing reaction to the talk of copycats and predictions of further copycats a week after VA Tech appears to be developing within the editorial rooms of the US media: Silence. Don't talk about it. Maybe people won't know there are copycats?

Decades of research and common sense are confirming that the copycat effect exists. You can read several examples on this blog and in my book, of course. Nevertheless, in the wake of VA Tech, the American media appears to be pulling back from exploring the fact that examples of the multiple varieties of murder-suicides and school violence are occurring.

Or are they consciously not reporting on active school violence and will be less graphic during the next school shooting?

Is this the same media that said the people have the "right to know" when justifying the posting of the Cho images, words, and video? Excuse me for being a little confused.

Or are we seeing some subtle differences when events happening are not direct imitations of VA Tech (as if those were the only copycats), or if the examples occur in Canada versus the USA?

Would the media rather report nonstop on the false bomb threats and discovered plots as "the copycats," but overlook the ones that really do occur? Is there an ignoring of the three Houston area murder-suicides and the standoff and suicide in Maine last week, which were certainly part of the copycat contagion seen?

The situation that has been revealed today exclusively in two Canadian news outlets was definitely school violence, and this fact was not lost on the Canadian media. It even has echoes of the Bailey, Colorado, and Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, hostage incidents within it.

According to The Globe and Mail and CBC News, the disturbing hostage situation took place at the Bois-Joly elementary school. The school is in "the trailer-park community of Place Ferland near Sept-Îles," as the The Globe and Mail referred to the setting, and continued, in part:

As some pupils played in the schoolyard yesterday during the mid-morning recess, a car came crashing through the school fence. A man got out of the vehicle, and students say he appeared to be in a fit of rage, and slapped and pushed six of the children.

A teacher who intervened to protect the children was brutally hit by the assailant, who then forced her into the school.

Inside, the man grabbed a nine-year-old boy and dragged him out, across the schoolyard and to a nearby gas station. There he took a nozzle from one of the pumps and sprayed the boy with gasoline.

"We didn't know if he was armed," principal Louise Bourgeois told TVA news. "He had circulated in the school and left by another door. Was he going to come back? He had just taken one of our students."

A teacher followed the man to the gas station and, along with a man who was pumping gas, pulled the child away from his assailant to safety. Shortly afterward, police arrived and took the 38-year old man into custody.

Ms. Bourgeois said she was shocked by the violence, and the entire staff and student body were traumatized.

According to police, the man was not related to the boy, yet appeared determined to immolate his young hostage for no reason....

The incident, which took place only a week after the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech in the United States, has awakened fears that troubled individuals are targeting schools....

Children who spoke to the media said the man firmly gripped his hostage and made his way toward the gas station.

"I stayed in the class when he took the hostage by the neck and yelled to everyone to get out of his way," one of the pupils said.>/p>

None of the children was injured. The Globe and Mail, 25 April 2007

Meanwhile, the only other mention was by the CBC News when noted, in part:

Police said a man crashed his car into the schoolyard fence during morning recess, got out, walked toward the school, hit six children and then dragged a teacher who tried to intervene into the school.

The man then grabbed a seventh child, fled the school on foot with the nine-year-old in tow and headed to a nearby gas station where he doused the boy with gasoline....

The man they have arrested has two children at the same school but is not related to the nine-year-old victim, police said. He faces several assault charges, and a count of forcible confinement, provincial police said. CBC News, 25 April 2007

Cho's Duck: Target Practice?

Cho Seung-Hui, as The Smoking Gun discovered, used the email address Blazers5505@hotmail.com and bought his ammunition clips on eBay. We know what gun store he used to purchase his guns.

The Smoking Gun also posted the eBay pages showing that Cho apparently won the auctions on 37 rubber duckies (36 small ones, one large) from the online auction site.

Some talk show hosts are using this piece of information in warped ways to ridicule Cho, joking about Cho playing with the bright yellow plastic ducks in his bathtub. I have a more sinister possibility for their use. What if the rubber ducks were used for target practice?

As every little tidbit on Cho is rolled out, reporters are making it sound like Cho was engaged in product placements.

We are hearing about every mundane detail on Cho's purchases, of late. Cho used the USPS, not UPS or FedEx to mail his package.

He bought the chains he used to keep the doors closed from Home Depot.

Cho played the song "Shine" all the time.

I'm almost expecting to see a spoof ad on YouTube any day now showing a racially-profiled actor holding up a 9mm Glock and endorsing the gunshops where Cho bought his guns and ammunition.

Would this be a better outcome in the midst of this current deconstruction of Cho's life in the wake of Cho's glorification footage on NBC and MSNBC being shown, instead of a new fatal copycat incident with more deaths in the next few days? Of course it would. Only time will tell, but if history is a guide, I recommend awareness to what is happening all around you.

One thing is certain, this is not a time to laugh-off any potential suicidal-homicial warning signs.

Copycat of Copycats

It is easy to be unhappy with the headlines in the New York Post. Today is no different - "Sick Homages From A Student of Psychos" - but reporter Jill Culora did an excellent job getting all her facts correct after she interviewed me for this story:

Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui plagiarized other school-shooting psychos in a twisted show of one-upmanship. He used the Internet to research and learn from infamous school killers, including Columbine HS's Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Duane Morrison of Bailey, Colo., and Kimveer Gill of Montreal, experts said.

In photos he sent to NBC News, Cho is seen wearing a black baseball cap backward, just as Harris wore in published images.

In others, Cho strikes poses disturbingly similar to those of Gill - who posted photos of himself online before his rampage last September at Montreal's Dawson College that killed one student and injured a dozen.

Gill's profile on the social-networking site VampireFreaks.com shows him pointing a pistol at the camera while holding a hunting knife in his right hand, just as Cho did his photos.

During his death spree, Cho chained doors closed - as Morrison did last year, when he held female students hostage at Platte Canyon HS and killed one. Cho mentioned "martyrs" Harris and Klebold in his videotaped manifesto.

"Cho was an empty vessel and he poured himself full from images off the [cable news and] Internet - the culture of Columbine, Dawson College and terrorism," said Loren Coleman, an expert on school shootings and author of The Copycat Effect.

"There's a psychological process that these shooters appear to be competing for the highest body count."Jill Culora, New York Post, Sunday, April 22, 2007.

Copycats In Dangerous Times

For those that have my book, The Copycat Effect, you will note that it is dedicated to my maternal grandmother, Nellie Gray, who was killed in a murder-suicide on Valentine's Day 1940. Yesterday ended with another murder-suicide, on the anniversary of Columbine. It was another murder-suicide in a week that began with the VA Tech murders-suicide. What did the cable news and other media outlets do with it? They let us know for hours and hours, with helicopters overhead showing a building, a SWAT vehicle in mud, and "danger" that there was a police standoff at NASA in Clear Lake near Houston, Texas. Another suicidal person in Clear Lake had taken the world media stage, I said to myself. (In my book, I write of Clear Lake, Texas, as a primary suicide cluster of the 1980s.)

Commentators filled air-time with speculations yesterday about this Clear Lake event being horrible to watch, as it unfolded in the wake of VA Tech. But they kept it on television until it ended with the discovery of the suicide of the man and that he had killed a male hostage three hours earlier. And that he had held a woman alive in the meantime.

Apparently the media remain unconscious to what they are doing. Let's see, the VA Tech tragedy and the NASA standout/murder-suicide are news events being squeezed in between the Anne Nicole Smith and Imus "news" and the Baldwin cellphone rants to his daughter. News as entertainment. But death news tends to be copycatted in many forms. College campuses are not the only sites we have to worry about.

Copycat situations have occurred on school and universities - in almost 30 states since Monday. But as I wrote and consulted about long ago, the school shootings set off other "rampage killers" too. Look and be aware beyond the schools.

I would not be surprised to see a "going postal" situation next week or another school shooting Monday or Tuesday, and then more throughout the whole next month. Right now the repeating action with be diffused and diverse - but the real events will be intense. The bar has been set higher by the media hype, and the results may be more brutal. Those bombs that did not go off at Columbine will be handled by youth who understand technology better. We are in dangerous times.

Here's what I wrote about the events triggered right after a large event such as VA Tech, in my book The Copycat Effect:

---------
p. 135
The copycat effect is a highly volatile phenomenon, spreading much like a match fire set to gasoline dripping across a service station lot. Individual violent acts portrayed in the media tend to spawn further events in the days and weeks that follow, though the subsequent events may be murder-suicides, mass murders, or mass suicides regardless of the precipitating event. Copycat murders and murder-suicides are real.

pp. 138-139
Publicity about a celebrity murder and murder-suicide serves as the spark to send a vulnerable, questioning, suicidal person in one of many directions. How the individual copes with the stresses leading to suicide, of course, varies from individual to individual, but by adding a model of behavior to the mix, via the media, pushes some people in a specific behavioral direction....[California sociologist] David Phillips has found an increase in both suicides and murder-suicides following other well-publicized suicides and murder-suicides, including in unrecognized aircraft accidents. Similarly, sociologist Steve Stack’s 1989 study, the first ever on the effect of publicized mass murders and murder-suicides, showed the interplay between the media, murder, suicide, and murder-suicides. Stack explored their impact on lethal aggression by focussing on the stories of mass murder-suicides and mass murders that aired on two or three of the network news channels (ABC, CBS & NBC) from 1968-1980. Stack found that mass murder/suicides are significantly associated with increases in the suicide rate. He also noted that one special type of mass murder, publicized gangland mass murders, were associated with increases in suicide.

p. 163
It became clear by the late 1990s that reports of workplace violence were not always just followed by other copycats of workplace incidents a day or a week later, but sometimes by other forms of mass and rampage violence as well. For example in the first week of November 1999, two workplace shootings on a Tuesday and a Wednesday shook the United States, which was already reeling from a long string of office and school killings for the year. In Seattle and Honolulu, the families of nine victims grieved as observers debated how to keep violence out of public settings traditionally considered safe. In Honolulu, seven people were shot to death when [a] Xerox technician...walked into a second-floor meeting room of the Xerox's offices and opened fire. He shot all the victims at close range with a 9mm handgun. In Seattle, the next day a gunman shot and killed two men and wounded two others in a shipyard office. Wearing a dark trench coat over camouflage clothing, the gunman had walked into the Northlake Shipyard building and proceeded down a long hallway and into a back office before wordlessly opening fire and shooting all four men in the room with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun. Two 9 mm guns, two Pacific Rim cities, two days of killings. Ten days later, another school shooting occurred in New Mexico.

p. 164
One type of copycat event was reinforcing another...

When such clustering occurs, with its mix of violence types, the copycatting is spreading from one type of incident to another....The violence is everywhere and the media is gobbling it up, unconsciously spreading it in the process.

420

What does "420" mean? April 20th? Or something deeper?

High school student Jeff Weise, an Ojibwa, killed ten, including himself, at the Red Lake Ojibwa Reservation in Minnesota, on March 21, 2005. A great admirer of Columbine, it was discovered that Weise left references to Columbine throughout his online presence. For example, he employed a username, which translated to "Abandoned 420."

Columbine and 420

Obviously, one meaning of "420" is directly linked to the Columbine date, as "4/20" is April 20, the anniversary of the Littleton, Colorado shootings. This date is also Adolf Hitler's birthday. The Columbine shooters, Klebold and Harris were extremely conscious that it was Hitler's birthdate, and often spoke German to each other, while walking around in long black trench coats, videotaping themselves.

Copycat Weise left messages on such sites as nazi.org. Weise wore a dark trench coat to school all year round, and had a swastika fascination, a symbol used by both First Nations people and Nazis. In one of Weise's online profiles, he noted that two of his favorite movies were Elephant and Zero Day, based on the events of the Columbine High School massacre.

Jeff Weise virtually haunted the Neo-Nazi Internet forum of the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party under the aliases NativeNazi and Todesengel (German for "Angel of Death"). He admired Hitler, his posts revealed. Weise also alleged online that his school was warned in 2004 that someone was going to "shoot up" the school on April 20, the birthday of Adolf Hitler and the anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre, and that the school authorities "pinned" the threat on him.

But Weise sometimes would sound almost typical. For example, on one of his user info pages, he said he was "nothin' but your average Native American stoner" and mentioned that he used marijuana. After Columbine, one oft-repeated story circulated that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were upset by an unfounded accusation made by an anonymous classmate that the two had brought marijuana to school, prompting a search of their property. Harris and Klebold were said to have found the incident humiliating.

The Other Meaning of 420

The use of "420" for almost four decades is related to the use of marijuana.

4:20 or 4/20 (pronounced four-twenty) is a term used in North America as a discreet way to refer to cannabis and, by extension, a way to identify oneself with cannabis culture. Phrases such as "420 friendly" sometimes appear in roommate advertisements, indicating that the current occupants are tolerant of cannabis users.

It is widely accepted that in 1971, a group of teenagers at San Rafael High School in San Rafael, California, calling themselves The Waldos, used to meet every day after school at 4:20 p.m. to smoke marijuana at the Louis Pasteur statue. The term became part of their group's salute, "420 Louis," and it eventually caught on more widely. Many cannabis users continue to observe 4:20 as a time to smoke communally. By extension April 20 ("4/20" in U.S. dating shorthand) has evolved into a counterculture holiday, where people gather to celebrate and consume cannabis. Source: Wikipedia

It was the research of Steven Hager, editor of High Times, who found the term 420 originated at San Rafael High School in 1971, among the Waldos. A quote from one of the Waldos in the article notes, "We did discover we could talk about getting high in front of our parents without them knowing by using the phrase 420."

Adolf Hitler, marijuana, Columbine: For copycats, 420 appears to have served as a reflective mirror. For the rest of us, 420 may reflect a dangerous combination that has resulted in terrible memories that now reach beyond the mere date of April 20th.

P. S. - Please give me the intellectual respect to understand this is not an anti-drug message, but one about awareness of the twilight language behind code words like "420" in one shooter's message. To think this is as an anti-marijuana blog is as illogical as thinking I am going to let myself get involved in the quicksand of a pro-gun-control vs pro-gun debate. Blaming drugs, guns, video games, and the long list of candidates seems to ignore what's happening in the imprinted mind of the suicidal potential school shooter.

Columbine

Columbine School Shooting, April 20, 1999

There were 15 people killed in the Columbine High School massacre.

Remember all the names of those who were lost to the violence:

* Cassie Bernall, 17
* Steven Curnow, 14
* Corey DePooter, 17
* Kelly Fleming, 16
* Eric David Harris, 18
* Matthew Kechter, 16
* Dylan Bennet Klebold, 17
* Daniel Mauser, 15
* Daniel Rohrbough, 15
* William David "Dave" Sanders, 47
* Rachel Scott, 17
* Isaiah Shoels, 18
* John Tomlin, 16
* Lauren Townsend, 18
* Kyle Velasquez, 16