Sudden spree of school shootings, Kimveer Gill, Duane Morrison, Charles Roberts

The news seems to be filled with tragic stories of school violence.  Kimveer Gill shot students in Montreal, Duane Morrison shot and killed Emily Keyes, and now Charles Carl Roberts has attacked an Amish school in Lancaster, PA.
 
 
Are these gunman copying each other?  Are they inspired by the media frenzy that follows each tragedy? 
 
 
Its a scary time to have children in schools.

 

 

A list of some fatal shootings at U.S. schools in recent years, linked from SeattlePI:

- Oct. 2, 2006: A gunman took about a dozen girls hostage, killing at least three of them, at a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania's Lancaster County, police said. The shooter was among the dead, and a number of people were injured.

- Sept. 29, 2006: 15-year-old Eric Hainstock brought two guns to a school in rural Cazenovia, Wis., and fatally shot the principal, a day after the principal gave him a disciplinary warning for having tobacco on school grounds, police said.

- Sept. 27, 2006: Duane Morrison, 53, took six girls hostage at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colo. Morrison, sexually assaulting them and using them as human shields for hours before fatally shooting one girl and killing himself.

- Aug. 24, 2006: Chris Williams, 27, went to an elementary school in Essex, Vermont, looking for his ex-girlfriend, a teacher. He couldn't find her and fatally shot one teacher and wounded another, police said. Williams also killed his ex-girlfriend's mother, according to authorities. He shot himself twice in the head after the rampage and was arrested.

- March 21, 2005: Sixteen-year-old Jeff Weise shot and killed five schoolmates, a teacher and an unarmed guard at a high school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota before taking his own life. Weise had earlier killed his grandfather and his grandfather's companion.