Shooting massacres in English-speaking countries often occur close together in time . In the summer of 1966 , two major stories broke : Richard Speck murdered eight women on a single night in Chicago , and Charles Whitman shot and killed 15 people from a clocktower at the University of Texas in Austin . Neither was seeking fame , but with the new television news climate , they received it anyway . Seeing this , 18-year-old Robert Benjamin Smith bought a gun , and on November 12 , 1966 , he killed four women and a toddler inside the Rose-Mar College of Beauty in Mesa , Arizona . “ I wanted to get known , just wanted to get myself a name , ” explained Smith . He had hoped to kill nearly ten times as many people , but had arrived at the beauty college campus too early . Upon his arrest , he was without remorse , saying simply , “ I wanted people to know who I was . ” Towers , et al. ( 2015 ) , found a small , but significant temporary increase in the probability of a second school shooting within 2 weeks after a known school shooting , which was only slightly smaller than the probability of repeats after mass killings involving firearms . However , much more work is needed with greater scope on investigations , to understand whether this is a real phenomenon or not . Some attribute this to copycat behaviour , which can be correlated with the level of media exposure . In these copycat shootings , oftentimes the perpetrators see a past school shooter as an idol , so they want to carry out an even more destructive , murderous shooting in hopes of gaining recognition or respect . Some mass murderers study media reports of previous killers
shot and killed 15 people from a clocktower
University of Texas tower shooting
School shooting