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Crime Expert Weighs In On Mass Shootings

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Nov 6, 2009 10:52 pm US/Eastern

Crime Expert Weighs In On Mass Shootings

Reporting
Stephanie Watson
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) ― Is it a sign of the times or a deadly trend?

In less than 24 hours, two shooting rampages sent shockwaves through our nation.

"I think history will show these will happen again. They happened in the past. I don't think we're going to just all of a sudden see a rash of these all over the country," Larry Likar, an FBI profiler and instructor at La Roche College, said.

Around 1:30 p.m. Thursday, a U.S. soldier opened fire with two handguns at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas, killing 12 soldiers and one civilian and injuring 30 others.

Then Friday at 11 a.m. a gunman in Orlando, Fla., went on a shooting rampage at an engineering firm that left one person dead and five others injured.

Likar doesn't believe this is a deadly trend, but it may be something called, "The Contagion Effect."

"The publication of this type of event will actually cause vulnerable people who are already predisposed to commit similar crimes to go ahead and do it," he said. "This is not the only occasion where you've seen a lot of these type of cases and the best example are the school shootings which happened over a period of years."

And many people in the Pittsburgh area are asking who could senselessly take so many innocent lives at once, especially after gunman George Sodini opened fire at the LA Fitness in Collier Township killing three women and wounding nine others before taking his own life in August.

"These are people that are depressed, they suffer from a sense of inadequacy, they usually are despondent, they often internalize their anger over a period of time," Likar said.

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