This week’s shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Wisconsin extends the 25-year shadow the Columbine High School shooting has cast over America.

On Monday, a 15-year-old student shot and killed two people and wounded four more before ending her own life. Like dozens of shooters before her, the Abundant Life perpetrator appears to have been inspired in part by the Columbine shooters who carried out their attack a decade before she was even born. Early reports indicate the shooter posted about the 1999 attack on social media and was even pictured wearing a shirt of the same obscure rock band one of the shooters did back then.

It’s worth asking whether last week’s assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson might end up having a similar effect.

First, let’s start with why the horrific legacy of Columbine has persisted for so long. The best explanation for this tragic phenomenon comes from Professors James Densley and Jillian Peterson. They are the researchers behind The Violence Project, which has studied mass shootings over the past several decades looking for trends and indicators that might explain and help prevent these kinds of killings.

They’ve spotlighted Columbine as a key event in the rise of modern mass shootings. Columbine wasn’t the first mass shooting by a long shot. It wasn’t the first school shooting, either. It wasn’t even the first major school shooting in 1999.

But the shooters went out of their way to try and inspire others to carry out similar attacks.

“[T]he main reason for Columbine’s longevity was that its perpetrators created manifestos and home movies of their preparations in hopes that their story would outlive them,” Densley and Peterson wrote all the way back in 2019. “Unfortunately, it has.”

The shooters created a kind of playbook for others to follow.

“Before Columbine, there was no script for how school shooters should behave, dress and speak,” the professors wrote. “Columbine created ‘common knowledge,’ the foundation of coordination in the absence of a standardized playbook.”

You can even see traces of that playbook in the UnitedHealthcare CEO killer’s actions, primarily his own “manifesto.” He also seemed to be sending a message to the public and, perhaps, others who see themselves in him.

He attacked the CEO of a company he doesn’t appear to have had actual business with, likely using him as a symbol of a system he was outraged by. He carried out his attack in front of witnesses and countless cameras. He left literal messages on the shell casings he used. He dropped a backpack in Central Park that was full of monopoly money. He appears to have 3D printed his gun and silencer even though he could have bought them through traditional channels.

His writings indicate these were all intentional. He described putting together the attack, including printing the gun’s frame, as “fairly trivial.” He said he was angry at the healthcare system but couldn’t fully articulate the details of why he felt murdering an executive at random was justified.

“What do you do? You wack the C.E.O. at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention,” he wrote in a notebook, according to The New York Times. “It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents.”

What’s more troubling than the method of the killing or the reasoning for it is the viral nature of it. His actions seemed designed to feed into the modern social media landscape. He may be the first TikTok killer, and that’s particularly concerning given the rest of Densley and Peterson’s explanation for why Columbine has endured as an inspiration for other killers all these years.

“Timing was everything,” they said. “The massacre was one of the first to take place after the advent of 24-hour cable news and during the ‘the year of the net.’ This was the dawn of the digital age of perfect remembering, where words and deeds live online forever. Columbine became the pilot for future episodes of fame-seeking violence.”

There have been many fame-seeking killers since Columbine, but few have been as successful at getting attention as the man who murdered Thompson. He has been the subject of news coverage, sure, but the video of his act of violence is world-famous by now.

Densley and Peterson point out there were always kids who felt like outcasts with a desire to lash out, but the Columbine shooting gave them a new and terrible way to do so. Will the same happen after Thompson’s killing? It certainly seems many more people sympathize with his motivations than any school shooter or mass murderer, with countless memes and videos valorizing him.

The percentage of people cheering or memeing Thompson’s killing who might actually carry out an attack of their own is probably much lower than those who’ve done the same for the Columbine attack, but it may not be zero. And the attention, even the negative attention, may contribute, however unintentionally, to this happening again. The phenomenon isn’t just reinforced by those who want these kinds of attacks to happen but by everyone who treats it as an expected part of life–which is often all of us.

“[W]e, the public, have contributed to the production and direction of this script. Again and again and again,” Densley and Peterson wrote of Columbine. “Through our obsession with true crime and films, books, memes and entire websites devoted to Columbine. By releasing CCTV footage of the shooting to the public. By running our children through regular lockdowns and active shooter drills starting in preschool through 12th grade. By sending them to school through secure entrances with clear backpacks and bulletproof binders. Society and culture have reared a Columbine generation, modeling that this is just part of childhood in America.”

That is one reason we limit the use of the shooter’s name in our reporting. But the reality is that people are interested in these attacks. Shooters are trying to create a spectacle, and spectacles are hard to ignore–even if one part of stopping them is to give them less attention.

There’s no guarantee the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s murder will inspire copycats. Hopefully, it won’t. But the factors that have led school shooters to try and recreate the Columbine attack for 25 years are present here and, perhaps, in more abundance than any similar act of violence we’ve seen in a long time.