From Trench Coats to Trends: The Stories We Tell — and Spread — After Tragedy

If you were in school in the early 2000s, you remember the look everyone was taught to watch for.

After the Columbine High School massacre, the image hardened almost overnight: the bullied loner, dressed in black, obsessed with violent games and angry music, pushed too far until he snapped. Assemblies warned students about outcasts. Parents worried about subcultures. News panels debated video games and goth fashion like they were warning labels.

It was a clean explanation. Too clean.

The narrative comforted people because it implied predictability. If violence came from a recognizable type of kid, then communities could spot it, schools could isolate it, and parents could prevent it. The danger had a costume. And as long as you didn’t match the costume, you were safe.

But over time, the facts refused to stay inside that story.

Investigations into later attacks showed many perpetrators were not relentlessly bullied outsiders. Some had friends. Some were academically successful. Some weren’t part of any dark subculture at all. Targets were rarely specific tormentors; they were symbolic places — the school itself, the workplace, the public setting. The common thread wasn’t a clique or a playlist. It was a behavioral progression: fixation, grievance, withdrawal, communication, planning.

The stereotype had taught society to watch personalities. The pattern required watching behaviors.

And yet something else happened in those years that we rarely acknowledge honestly: the attacks became famous.

Television coverage ran for days. Front pages carried the perpetrators’ faces. Networks dissected their writings, their clothing, their music, their childhoods. The story didn’t end when the violence ended — it expanded. The attackers became the center of a national narrative.

Researchers later noticed a troubling pattern: incidents clustered after intense coverage. Not because reporting causes violence, but because publicity provides two powerful things to a person already spiraling — a script and an audience. The script shows how an attack unfolds. The audience promises that the person who felt invisible will be seen everywhere.

To most viewers, the coverage felt like collective mourning. To a tiny, unstable subset, it could look like recognition.

Over time, many media organizations quietly changed how they reported these events. Names were repeated less. Manifestos were withheld more often. Victims’ lives were emphasized over perpetrators’ biographies. Tactical details were reduced. The coverage did not disappear — but the spotlight shifted. With less spectacle came fewer imitation clusters after major events.

Which brings us to the present moment — and a familiar human mistake.

When a perpetrator belongs to a group already under cultural attention, coverage often centers the identity. The person becomes not just an attacker, but a symbol. Every article asks what it “means.” Panels debate the category. The identity becomes the headline.

But psychologically, that does something similar to what happened decades ago with subcultures: it turns the act into a narrative role.

In a media environment saturated with discussion about transgender people — from politics to culture — an attacker who is transgender can become the focus of intense explanatory storytelling. Not because the identity caused the violence, but because the identity becomes the frame through which the violence is interpreted. The risk is that the individual act gains amplified meaning far beyond the individual.

For someone already seeking significance, the message can be misread not “this is condemned,” but “this will make me visible.”

The pattern is not new. The label simply changes.

The early 2000s attached the story to trench coats.

Later years attached it to ideology.

Today, more often, it attaches to identity.

Each era searches for a defining trait, and in doing so may unintentionally supply the same reward — attention concentrated on the perpetrator rather than the behavior that preceded the act.

None of this suggests silence or ignoring reality. The public must be informed. But information and amplification are not identical. Media choices shape which parts of a tragedy become culturally significant: the life that was lived, or the life that tried to define itself through destruction.

If coverage emphasizes warning behaviors, intervention points, and victims’ stories — the narrative teaches prevention. If coverage emphasizes the perpetrator’s identity and notoriety — the narrative can teach imitation to the very few people vulnerable to it.

We didn’t misunderstand the early 2000s because we lacked compassion. We misunderstood them because we searched for a category instead of a pattern — and sometimes turned the pattern into a script.

The lesson hasn’t changed: Violence does not spread through identities. It spreads through stories about how a final act makes a person unforgettable.