Is it time that government regulates the media & possibly bans reporting on mass killings?

The Contagian Effect is real

quote:

---

We’re starting to better understand the epidemiology behind this tragic trend. While the research is limited, a recent Arizona State University study found strong evidence that school shootings and other acts of mass violence are contagious.

The researchers did a statistical analysis of 176 mass shooting events in the U.S. from 2006 to 2011 and 220 school shootings between 1997 and 2013. They discovered that mass shootings were significantly more likely to occur if another shooting that received national media coverage took place in the previous 13 days — a finding that suggests that mass shootings tend to cluster together in a similar manner to suicides. This was “apparently due to the [media] coverage planting the seeds of ideation in at-risk individuals to commit similar acts,” the study said.

“People had suspected for a long time that mass killings were contagious,” Sherry Towers, a research professor at Arizona State University and the study’s lead author, told The Huffington Post. “Our study was the first to use to use a contagion model to quantify how much contagion there actually is in these kinds of tragedies.”

---

a reasonable society would not just sit back and allow the press to report on these shootings without any restrictions, which will increase the likelihood hood of another mass shooting. what we need is common sense regulation of the press that no reasonable person could oppose.

we need to adopt mainstream values of today to this problem of mass media. when the founding fathers drafted the protections of the press in the 1st Amendment, they could NEVER imagine a media like we had today. they clearly only intended to protect words written by hand or the printing press, and could never conceive of cable tv let alone the internet and streaming news coverage. it's clear they never intended for THIS to be covered by the 1st Amendment