The "influence" of media coverage, SWATing, and copy cat crimes...

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, Ph.D is a book I strongly recommend.

One of his chapters is on Social Proof and how canned laughter works in television.  Cialdini also notes that suicides rate dramatically spikes after a suicide is widely reported in the media:

A fascinating example of social proof based on the research of David Phillips has been dubbed the "Werther effect" (after Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.) After studying suicide statistics in the United States from 1947 to 1968, Phillips discovered that "within two months after every front-page suicide story, an average of fifty-eight more people than usual killed themselves" and that "this tendency for suicides to beget suicides occurred principally in those parts of the country where the first suicide was highly publicized and that the wider the publicity given the first suicide, the greater the number of later suicides" (146). The rash of airplane and automobile crashes is explained as an attempt by the copycat suicides--acting on the basis of social proof--to be more furtive about their purposeful death: for a variety of reasons, they engineer an accident rather than killing themselves directly, and they make sure that the accident will be lethal! So powerful is the effect of social proof, if the publicized suicide is a young person, there will be young people dying in accidents for the weeks following the story.

And it is not like it just creates a false peak and then a subsequent drop off.  After such a spike, the suicide rate holds steady.  Media coverage of suicide increases actual suicides.

The same is apparently true for crime (at least the LAPD thinks so).  SWATing incidents (at least celebrity ones) will no longer be reported to the press.  I am glad the LAPD is looking out for celebrities.

Which raises the question: Is that also true for say...mass shootings by maniacs?  Are Newtown, Connecticut and Aurora, Colorado less about access to guns, especially since such incidents have happened world wide, than copy cat maniacs looking for immortality through media attention?  Rather than controlling guns, maybe we could start controlling songs and anthems that seem to encourage more of the same (and I am being sarcastic, I do not want to restrict speech, but point out restricting 2nd amendment rights makes no more sense than restricting 1st amendment rights).  Unless of course you have ulterior motives (like many on the left seem to have)...

Update:
The Virginian asks: Why do Democrats want children to die? Well (as noted immediately above by Jeff Goldstein and Geoff B) the Democrats have bigger goals and a few score of dead kids are worth getting that.
The Social Proof effect is why the left really wants to maintain control of the media and education.