treating peasant mass-violence like an infectious disease?

csmonitor | In a 2010 article, James Knoll, director of forensic psychiatry at the State University of New York's Upstate Medical University, wrote that mass killers are " 'collectors of injustice' who nurture their wounded narcissism."

Others have pointed to a narcissistic streak in Rodger. Forbes's Kashmir Hill writes:

Rodger’s Facebook page is full of selfies and photos of his rich but lonely life. There are photos of him, by himself, flying first class and attending a private Katy Perry concert, and with his parents, at the Hunger Games premiere in 2012; his father was an assistant director of the film. Friends are generally absent from the photos and make few comments; he likes many of his own photos, and is usually the only one to do so. He was obsessed with himself and with putting his opulent lifestyle on display, and Facebook was the perfect outlet for it.

A mass killing, then, becomes a plea for attention – an attempt by the chronically overlooked to be heard, and feared. To Mr. Schulman, that means the particulars of each case – looking at motive, mental health, or misogyny – are less important than the way society reacts. When the media spread fear, broadcast a killer's manifesto, and endlessly show his photos, they fuel the next round of potential mass killers by helping the last one accomplish his goals.

Mass killings, he suggests, are contagious. He likens them with suicides, noting a rash of suicides on the subway system in Vienna in 1984. Suicides fell by 75 percent after a group of researchers at the Austrian Association for Suicide Prevention persuaded local media to change their coverage "by minimizing details and photos, avoiding romantic language and simplistic explanations of motives, moving the stories from the front page and keeping the word 'suicide' out of the headlines."

Speaking of mass killings, Schulman added: "Whatever the witch's brew of influences that produced this grisly script, treating mass killings as a kind of epidemic or contagion largely frees us from having to understand the particular causes of each act. Instead, we can focus on disrupting the spread."