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School shootings, defined as acts of mass armed violence perpetrated within educational institutions, elicit significant media attention. This extensive coverage, however, raises concerns regarding its potential contribution to the “copycat effect”, where subsequent crimes are inspired by media portrayals of previous incidents. Furthermore, media narratives can significantly influence public perceptions of both the victims and the perpetrators involved. This study aims to analyze the narrative of school shooting within four key categories: victim portrayal, perpetrator description, perceived motives, and the act itself. The results reveals a dominant narrative structure that closely follows the chronological sequence of the perpetrator’s actions. This mirroring effect, likely driven by the inherent demands of streaming media formats, results in a construction of victim narratives “through the lens” of the perpetrator. Consequently, information regarding the perpetrators and their actions tends to dominate the media landscape, potentially overshadowing the experiences and perspectives of the victims. These findings carry significant implications for the development of ethical guidelines within journalism and professional standards for reporting on mass gun violence in schools. Moreover, the identified patterns in media narratives could serve as valuable input for developing mathematical models that explore the potential link between media representations of school shootings and the occurrence of copycat crimes.

Scientific research on schoolshooting has been actualized in the early 21st century, but incidents have been recorded much earlier, since the late 16th century. The article focuses on the causes and explanation of the mechanism of imitation, a significant driving force in schoolshooting. Examples of cases are given to illustrate the effect of the copycat mechanism and measures to prevent the spread of the 'copycat effect' are argued. The paper identifies the key features that unite terrorism and schoolshooting, which provide a strong case for considering schoolshooting incidents as a new type of terrorism. The similarity of schoolshooting incidents to terrorist acts is argued through the description of common characteristics, such as ritual and demonstrative nature of violence, planned and symbolic nature of violence, cultural determination, and group identification. This paper focuses not on the scientific problem of studying schoolshooting as a special phenomenon, but on the problems of creating, organizing, and managing a proactive system of schoolshooting prevention. The results of the analysis of American practice of development and application of threat assessment system to prevent schoolshooting are presented. The description of necessary elements of the complex system for prevention of schoolshooting incidents is presented, the definition of the proactive system is given.

The article presents the theoretical approaches of foreign and domestic authors to the definition of subcultures, including youth subcultures. The subcultural phenomenon of sсhoolshooting as a progressive destructive phenomenon of modern society is considered. The issues of functioning of sсhoolshooting subculture are analyzed, the mechanisms, ways of interaction, «cultural scenarios» that operate within the subculture are highlighted. The reasons for adolescents to join the subculture of sсhoolshooting are described. The accession of young people to the subculture of sсhoolshooting can be caused by various reasons, problems and factors, which within the framework of this work are united into three groups: social problems, psychological problems and socio-cultural processes. The main result of the study is the construction of a model of the subcultural foundations of sсhoolshooting, which presents the main aspects of the functioning of this subculture. The genesis of sсhoolshooting has ontological, axiological, and anthropological foundations. The analysis of sсhoolshooting subculture is possible through a polyparadigmatic approach, which implies the use of social action theory, deformation theory, deviation theory and subcultures. The role of the media in functioning of the sсhoolshooting subculture is defined. On the one hand, the media actually play a key role in shaping the subculture of sсhoolshooting by broadcasting and replicating role models of behavior to the masses. But, on the other hand, the media can perform the function of destroying myths and stereotypes associated with sсhoolshooting. The article also presents the social mechanisms through which adolescents can get into the subculture of sсhoolshooting. Three mechanisms are highlighted: «digital mediation», imitation, and social contamination. As the main outcome of the article, the main subcultural foundations of sсhoolshooting are highlighted. These are ideological and semantic, social, psychological, and cultural bases.