Most people, said La Rochefoucauld, would never fall in love if they'd never heard of it. Whether or not it is true of love, it might be true of mass shootings—that is, one mass shooting encourages another, so that they seem to come in clusters, piling horror on horror. Few people will believe that the mass shooting in Dayton, in which nine people so far have lost their lives, is entirely unconnected with the shooting just hours earlier in El Paso, in which 20 people have died.
The role of imitation in the commission of acts of violence by the susceptible has been known since at least the end of the eighteenth century, when romantic young men in Europe committed suicide after the publication of Goethe's novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, the eponymous hero of which killed himself for unrequited love. Even today, a suicide in a soap opera is sometimes followed by a brief spate of suicides—such that producers are now wary of depicting suicides, for fear of being accused of provoking them.
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