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In this April 28, 1999, file photo, a woman stands among 15 crosses posted on a hill above Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in remembrance of the 15 people who died during a school shooting on April 20, 1999.(Photo: Eric Gay, AP)
WASHINGTON — The Killing Season<span style="color: Red;">*</span>isn’t just a B-rated Hollywood thriller. It’s also a term used by some experts on domestic terrorism to describe a spike in extremist<span style="color: Red;">*</span>violence that begins … right about now.
This is not about the kind horrific shootings that unfolded in rural Ohio and eastern Georgia on Friday, leaving two families devastated and 13 people dead.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>Authorities in those two separate incidents are still searching for motives, but none of the killings<span style="color: Red;">*</span>appear to be inspired by extremist ideology.
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That kind of violence is<span style="color: Red;">*</span>“pretty evenly distributed throughout the year,” said Sherry Towers, a professor at Arizona State University who has studied how media coverage of mass killings can inspire copycat attacks.
But experts on American hate groups and domestic terrorism say that April often ushers in a spate of attacks related to right-wing or jihadist beliefs.
“We know that some terrorists and school shooters and other mass shooters consider some symbolic dates to be important,” said Adam Lankford, a criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama.
For example, he said, the Columbine shooters “were into Hitler and Hitler’s birthday is April 20th." That became<span style="color: Red;">*</span>the day in 1999<span style="color: Red;">*</span>when<span style="color: Red;">*</span>Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people at the Colorado high school.
The north side of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City is missing after a bombing on April 19, 1995.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>(Photo: Anonymous, AP)
He noted that Harris and Klebold were also interested in Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who blew up a federal building in that city on April 19, 1995. McVeigh, in turn, said his attack was a tribute to those who died in the FBI’s April 19, 1993,<span style="color: Red;">*</span>siege on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
“So to some degree, what that suggests is the spring and April has importance for some of these attackers,” Lankford said.
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Researchers at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks domestic hate groups, are currently probing this<span style="color: Red;">*</span>trend.
“We know from looking at the data that there tends to be a season in which a lot of domestic terrorism attacks occur, and that season runs sort of from early April into the early fall,” said Heidi Beirich, an expert on domestic extremism at the center.
Beirich said the symbolic April dates may trigger some acts, but violence inspired by hatred or bigotry stretches well past that month.
She cited, for example, the August 2012 attack in which Wade Michael Page, who had ties to white supremacist groups, fatally shot six people and wounded several others at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. And last June’s massacre in South Carolina, where shooter Dylann Roof killed nine parishioners at a predominantly African-American church in Charleston.
“We call it attack timing compression,” said Chuck Vance, an analyst at the center.
Vance said the center’s research shows that 78.9% of lethal far-right attacks and 81.8% of lethal jihadi attacks have occurred in the April-to-September period. They have looked at all such killings since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.
While the trend is clear, Vance said, the reasons for it are not.
“We’re kind of drawing conclusions with crayons here,” he said. “We don’t have enough data” to understand what some have called "the killing season."
Towers, the Arizona researcher, said there is a “contagion effect,” in which media coverage of one mass killing leads to other similar attacks.
“Killings that receive national or international media attention do indeed inspire similar events a significant fraction of the time,” Towers said in a Q&A<span style="color: Red;">*</span>on her research,<span style="color: Red;">*</span>posted on the university’s website last fall.
Dylann Roof appears at a bond hearing court in North Charleston, S.C., on June 19, 2015.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>(Photo: Grace Beahm, AP)
She noted, for example, that during the 2015 trial of James Holmes, who opened fire in a Colorado movie theater, the father of one of the victims openly feared the media coverage would inspire copycat killings.
“Unfortunately, his prediction came true,” Towers said in the Q&A. “A gunman opened fire in a Louisiana movie theater in 2012, and in a Tennessee movie theater a man attacked people with a hatchet. All within two weeks.”
In an interview Saturday,<span style="color: Red;">*</span>Towers said the contagion theory could be at work in the Ohio and Georgia killings, which were bunched together and both involved the killings of multiple family members. At the same time, she cautioned that April is not a stand-out month in terms of violence.
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Horrific past shootings such as Columbine “stick in people’s minds” and feed a misperception that April is a super violent month. “But really it’s just like any other month,” she said.
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