So what's up with all these shootings?

Having grown up close enough to Pennsylvania Amish country that the sight of horse-and-buggies clopping down the street between cars and trucks was not a novelty, I could picture the scene of a national cable news convergence on a quiet Amish schoolyard even before it was conjured up on each of the major news channels, in one case with an unidentified white-bearded Amish man being interviewed in a split-screen shot alongside a scene of the schoolhouse.
I think I had fallen prey to the prevailing pessimism that's been brooding in the country, with yesterday's incident marking the third so-called "school shooting" in a week. What's going on here?
Tonight's NewsHour interview with forensic psychologist and juvenile violence expert Dewey Cornell shed a little light, as Dr. Cornell noted that, overall, violence at schools in the U.S. has gone down over the last several years, although there have obviously been a number of sensational cases that seem to suggest it is becoming some kind of epidemic. He made the point that coining and throwing around the term "school shooting" has the potential to create an arbitary category that may serve as a lure for desperate people looking for the maximum notoriety for their violent fantasies.
As someone who works, to cite my bio, in the communications/media industry, I'm certainly not one of those who believes the media is the root of all evil; certainly not in the sense that violent video games or pornography incite normal, well-adjusted people to violence. And I don't believe that 24-hour cable news channels are slowly devouring the brains of those who watch them (provided those viewers take occasional breaks to eat, sleep and other things essential to life in the three-dimensional world.)
However, I do think it would be productive to examine the larger implications of 24-hour, internationally broadcast cable news, whose bread and butter, is, to be brutally honest, the "big stories" (which never tend to be the warm and fuzzy kind) on psychologically unstable individuals desiring to write their pain in a large hand across the world they feel has wronged them.
When you have people, whether kids or adults, with violent tendencies, either due to childhood abuse, relationships gone bad, school bullying or simply unmedicated psychopathology, offering them the promise of posthumous gratification of a megalomaniacal desire for instant, worldwide notoriety, while it is far from the cause of such behavior (these are people who, unless they got help or found a way to help themselves, would inevitably act out in some way, at some time) but I'm just thinking that the lure of those 15 minutes probably doesn't help much.