Are terrorist attacks Europe’s high-school massacres?

In the light of the recent horrible events in Copenhagen, I’m starting to wonder whether terrorist attacks are becoming Europe’s version of America’s high-school massacres.

Both high-school massacres and small-scale terrorist attacks are typically done by young people who feel they don’t fit in, and they’re heavily publicised by the media.

Lionel Shriver wrote the following back in 2007; however, wouldn’t almost every word of it apply to many recent terrorist attacks in Europe?

If it does not sound too tautological, campus shootings keep happening because they keep happening. Every time one of these stories breaks, every time the pictures flash round the world, it increases the chances that another massacre will follow. In the main, all of these events are copycat crimes. Campus shootings are now a genre, much as, in literature, campus-shooting novels are a genre, one of whose entries I am guilty of writing myself. They are part of the cultural vocabulary, and any disgruntled, despairing or vengeful character — of any age of late, since grown-ups now want in on the act — now has the idea of shooting up a campus firmly lodged in his brain.

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I would far prefer that this new killer remained anonymous. Were all such culprits to remain utterly and eternally unknown, the chips on their shoulders interred with their bones, their grudges for ever private, surely the frequency of these grotesquely gratuitous sprees would plummet. One of the driving forces for most of these killers is not just to be noticed, but, however perversely, to be understood.

Of course there are terrorist attacks that are carefully planned by organisations consisting mainly of grown-up people, and maybe they should be handled differently. However, I can’t help thinking that perhaps we’re actually causing lots of small terrorist attacks by talking about them too much.

Would it not be better if media reported such attacks in a low-key fashion, without talking too much about the perpetrator’s identity and reasons, basically treating them pretty much as if they had been bank robberies with the same number of casualties?

Of course it’s hard to force the media to tone down their reporting when there’s a huge amount of public interest, but at the very least we should perhaps try to keep the big headlines inside the country where the attack happened instead of publicising every one of them across the entire continent. For extremists, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.