The Detail That Doesn’t Glorify, It Instructs
When a news report walks through exactly how a mass shooting unfolded, the usual worry is that detail turns the attacker into an anti-hero others might imitate. Two engineers at New York University found a stranger possibility underneath that worry: for someone chasing fame through violence, a detailed account isn’t a tribute but a reference file, a record of what’s already been tried, and what hasn’t.
Why Some Attacks Get Remembered, and Others Don’t
If public memory simply tracked body count, the attacks everyone still recognizes by name would be the deadliest ones. That isn’t quite how it works. Some shootings with relatively small death tolls have stayed fixtures of public conversation for decades, while others fade outside the communities that lived through them. Maurizio Porfiri, who directs NYU’s Dynamical Systems Laboratory and the Center for Urban Science and Progress, and graduate student Rayan Succar decided to measure that gap instead of just noticing it.
They Turned Wikipedia Traffic Into a Fame Score
Porfiri, Succar, and their co-authors analyzed 189 mass shootings carried out between 1966 and 2021. To gauge fame, they used median daily Wikipedia page visits over time. By that measure, the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and the 2017 Las Vegas Strip massacre rank among the most visited.
They also built a second score, “surprisal,” borrowed from information theory, measuring how much an attack’s location and targets departed from the pattern set by every prior shooting in the dataset. Once they controlled for casualties, lethality dropped out of the picture: there was no link between how surprising an attack was and how many people were killed or injured, or how deadly the weapon. What did track with fame was surprisal itself, attacks by fame-seeking shooters were about three times more surprising than attacks carried out for other reasons.
How Detailed Coverage Becomes a Blueprint
Porfiri describes it in terms of what counts as “normal.” Every story reporting precisely where an attack happened and who was targeted adds a data point to the public record of what a mass shooting usually looks like. A fame-motivated attacker studying that record isn’t hunting for inspiration so much as mapping territory already claimed. The aim isn’t a higher death toll but avoiding every location, target, and method already on record. That reframes “copycat” behavior: less repetition, more a deliberate search for an angle nobody has used yet.
Rethinking “No-Notoriety” Reporting
This lines up with journalism’s “no-notoriety” push, where outlets withhold a shooter’s name and photo so violence doesn’t become a path to recognition. Porfiri and Succar’s findings suggest the risk runs deeper than glorification: a flatly neutral paragraph describing exactly how an attack happened can still function as a map of what’s already taken, nudging the next fame-seeker toward unclaimed ground. Sympathetic and openly condemning coverage can carry the same risk, as long as both are specific enough to be useful.
What This Means for Red Flag Laws
The researchers tie this to red flag laws, which let courts temporarily restrict firearm access for someone showing signs of danger to themselves or others. Porfiri notes fame-seeking shooters tend to signal plans before acting, making early detection a real point of leverage. The study’s logic also flips a common instinct: a warning that sounds too unusual to take seriously may be exactly the kind of plan a fame-seeker produces, since standing out is the point. “Nothing like that has ever happened” is a weak reason to dismiss a threat, it might be reason to take it more seriously.
One Study, Not a Verdict
This is one research group’s reading of one dataset, not a settled conclusion across criminology or media studies. How shooters were classified as fame-seeking, versus driven by grievance or revenge, isn’t spelled out in public summaries of the work, nor is the full math behind the surprisal score. Porfiri has also said the field needs more funding before findings like these can be turned into tested policy. A genuine tension remains: the public’s interest in understanding these events, a press obligated to report what happened, and the possibility that the most responsible reporting is also the least detailed. The finding doesn’t resolve that tension, it just makes it harder to ignore.