"One measures a circle, beginning anywhere."
~ Charles Fort, Lo!, 1931.
On September 17, 2012, Dangerous Minds published "Copycat Effect: Meet The Man Who Predicted The Aurora Shooting" by British writer Thomas McGrath. You will want to read it.
I thank the author for his respectful article, which in a few hundred words tries to capture 30 years of my serious research of the copycat effect. I also appreciate those readers who are open-mindedly digesting this material, with the understanding that forecasting human behavior is going to be the next leap forward in foresnic psychology and the prevention of suicidal and homicidal events.
I've been doing this research for a long time. It is not often that someone captures the essence of it as well as this British profiler did.
I realize that some people don't like the use of the word "prediction" in the article's headline, for I am clearly not a psychic and do not claim to be one. But it is a useful handle to quickly communicate a concept about pre-event forecasting that few people understand.
If you read what I said on July 19th, the reality is that I did write before the Aurora event, in seemingly "prophetic" tones for people outside this field, that something big and violent, tied quite specifically to the opening of The Dark Knight Rises, was going to occur on July 20, 2012. This was not written after the fact. It was noted before it happened. There was a great deal to what I said, about past patterns, Joker copycats, violence, and examples like the anniversary of the Norway shootings that took place when Captain America was released on July 22, 2011.
I appreciate the accolades and accords given to me by Dangerous Minds author Thomas McGrath. I thank him for his clear reading of my insights, which, while grounded in Fort's and Jung's works that I read over 50 years ago, were not held against me.
We all start somewhere, as per the famed quote up top, and I'm delighted with my conceptualizations that have matured nicely since then.
1 comment:
It was a good article, written from the viewpoint of an outsider to this field, and yet managed to convey a sense of respect, and that perhaps people in the mainstream should dare to look into it further.
Post a Comment