Victim Precipitation & Columbine

I think that there are substantial influences of victim precipitation on many violent crimes, in particular those involving alcohol.  When people lower their inhibitions and effect their judgement via alcohol, they may be more inclined to pick fights, stagger into others provoking a response to an imagined attack, or aggressively pursue an undesired romantic interest, all of which can precipitate assault and other forms of violent crime.  

Victim precipitation has often been blamed for the Columbine school massacre, playing on the beliefs that the killers had been taunted, and were lashing back at the victims.  However, I do not think that there was any victim precipitation in the attack on Columbine.  This seems one of the myths of Columbine created in the media circus following the event.  

In the CNN Article, Debunking the Myths of Columbine, 10 Years Later (CNN, 2009 - http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/04/20/columbine.myths/index.html?_s=PM:CRIME ), author Stephanie Chen discusses many of the myths believed by the general public about Columbine.  Among these are that the killers were part of the Trench Coat Mafia (they weren't), that they had been harrassed or teased before (no more than typical high schoolers), were loners (in fact, they were popular with a tight circle of friends), and targeted jocks and blacks (which they did not).  

Another myth of Columbine was that the students created a hit list of intended targets.  However, the list had several joke entries (e.g. Tiger Woods), and nobody on the "hit list" was injured or killed in the event.  Rather than being outcasts, Harris and Klebold were reportedly far more accepted than most of their peers. (Sidebar, Slate Magazine, author & pub. date unknown http://www.slate.com/sidebars/2004/04/sidebar_3.html ).  If anything, the victims of Columbine seems to have been selected because the target was a known, familiar ground to the killers, much as the poor frequently prey on the poor in their neighborhood.  

According to Dave Cullen, in an article published 4/20/2004 in Slate, The Depressive and the Psychopath: At last we know why the Columbine killers did it (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/assessment/2004/04/the_depressive_and_the_psychopath.html), FBI psychiatrists and psychologists have categorized Klebold as a depressive, suicidal and disturbed young man who blamed himself for his problems.  Harris however, has been classified as a psychopath by the FBI, a cold, calculating and homicidal killer, and not just a depressed loner.  

According to Cullen, who spent years meticulously researching Columbine, the students were not seeking a school shooting at all, and mocked the notion of a school shooting.  Their intent, rather, was a massive detonation of bombs both inside and outside the school, while providing strafing fire to gun down any who escaped the carnage.  They planned on a body count to inflict the "largest number of deaths in U.S. history," intent on topping the murders committed by the Oklahoma City Bombing.  Precipitation does not seem to have been a factor in the aggregate in the Columbine shooting.  Only at the micro level, as individual students chose to run, cower, hide, and other minute decisions did those precipitate their personal victim status -- if they chose wrong, they were injured or killed. This doesn't seem, however, to be victim precipitation, as a crime was already in progress, and it was just their response to it.

Media Carpet-bombing Violent Crime

Perhaps the most substantive change to the nature of news over the past 30 years is that our use of technology has created an immediacy to news access throughout the chain of events, coupled with the "CNN effect".  Reporters are on the scene, dispatched with satellite uplinks, and the pictures are made available on TV screens at bars, Starbucks, gas pumps, elevators and in the work place.  

Where the crime news of the day would have only been received on the 5pm and 11pm news, and the morning paper previously, we are having it pumped into our pocket via Twitter feeds, SMS messages and news feeds.  This immediacy of news has created mini-markets of opportunity to create market share and gain ad revenue if you can be the major news organ reporting on an issue.  The utter saturation with news means that, as a populace, we are bombarded with stories of tragedies.  It's like we want to soak in it like a hot bath, to revel and steep in the information.  What before might have been confined to 6 column inches in a newspaper 3 months after the fact is now created with 40 hours of coverage.

I think this immediacy, and the saturation of media, is a significant force in fooling the American people into believing that violent crime has gone up over the past 15 years, when the opposite is true.

Mass murder events are relatively flat over the past 30 years. What has changed is the immediacy of learning about it, and the saturation by the media.  The most deadly case of school violence in US history was actually nearly 100 years ago, in Bath, Michigan.  Mass murder is a human problem of mental health and evil.