A couple of years ago, I took a few of the social psychology courses available from big name universities online on Coursera. It was free and I still don't know anything about anything, but... For the most part it was presented as having been experimentally proven that the more coverage this kind of event got, the more copycats you could expect in the following weeks, as everyone else who had been harboring similar thoughts would see the coverage as a green light. It's not a joke at all.
I like this idea. The event gets covered, but not the perp.
If we have to march off into the next world, let us walk there on the bodies of our enemies.