I've always felt this fit into Gladwell's article from the New Yorker about gun violence: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-violence

I've always felt this fit into Gladwell's article from the New Yorker about gun violence: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-violence https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-... The overview is that for gun violence, one act makes the next one slightly more likely. When people see someone perform an act, ones like shootings or suicides, others see it as somewhat more acceptable. Here's a relevant quote: > In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store. Take out riots, and add suicides, and there's a match. I know people can have different opinions on Gladwell, but I feel this is a very well thought out writing about it, and in a way that isn't talked about. Here's a podcast episode where he talks about it too: https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/political-scene/malcolm-gladwell-on-understanding-school-shooters https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/political-scene/malcolm-gl...