> In Austria, "Media Guidelines for Reporting on Suicides", have been issued to the media since 1987 as a suicide-preventive experiment. Since then, the aims of the experiment have been to reduce the numbers of suicides and suicide attempts in the Viennese subway and to reduce the overall suicide numbers. After the introduction of the media guidelines, the number of subway suicides and suicide attempts dropped more than 80% within 6 months. Since 1991, suicides plus suicide attempts - but not the number of suicides alone - have slowly and significantly increased. The increase of passenger numbers of the Viennese subway, which have nearly doubled, and the decrease of the overall suicide numbers in Vienna (-40%) and Austria (-33%) since mid 1987 increase the plausibility of the hypothesis, that the Austrian media guidelines have had an impact on suicidal behavior.
It seems quite likely that the inevitable publicity of mass shootings encourages copycats. Occasionally the shooters even leave a note / manifesto explaining this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide
eg this example of media reporting guidelines that appear to have reduced deaths by suicide: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18082110
> In Austria, "Media Guidelines for Reporting on Suicides", have been issued to the media since 1987 as a suicide-preventive experiment. Since then, the aims of the experiment have been to reduce the numbers of suicides and suicide attempts in the Viennese subway and to reduce the overall suicide numbers. After the introduction of the media guidelines, the number of subway suicides and suicide attempts dropped more than 80% within 6 months. Since 1991, suicides plus suicide attempts - but not the number of suicides alone - have slowly and significantly increased. The increase of passenger numbers of the Viennese subway, which have nearly doubled, and the decrease of the overall suicide numbers in Vienna (-40%) and Austria (-33%) since mid 1987 increase the plausibility of the hypothesis, that the Austrian media guidelines have had an impact on suicidal behavior.