Copycat crimes have traditionally proven to be hard to both identify and analyze, although it has long been known that they occur. The present study analyzed the copycat crimes that followed the Columbine massacre of 1999 in light of fad theory and found that a copycat crime is, essentially, a fad. The pattern of development followed a particular progression with variations on the initial incident and reached a peak, whereupon the number of copycat incidents dropped radically. This pattern allows for predictability of copycat crimes.
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