Mourners hold candles during a moment of silence during a vigil to mark the shooting at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas.

Active shootings in the US have gotten deadlier and more frequent, the product of a vicious cycle in which intense media scrutiny inspires others to also kill for their own moment in the grim spotlight, experts say.

Last year, the US experienced what researchers say was hopefully an anomaly, with the highest number of active shooter incidents in nearly a decade, according to a new FBI report. From 2014 to 2016, the FBI documented 20 active shooter events per year, 175 people killed as a result. That number, while high, had been holding relatively steady until 2017, when the number spiked to 30 incidents. Nearly 140 people died in those attacks, including 58 people in the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history in Las Vegas.

All of the shooters were men and acted alone.

Experts told BuzzFeed News the recent uptick is likely due to the amount of attention the attacks get and the fixation on the people behind them, spurring copycats while at the same time desensitizing the public. Inadequate and poorly enforced laws don't help, they added.

"These shooters get great satisfaction in doing this, and the media attention they get afterwards puts them in a place of history," said Greg Shaffer, a 20-year FBI veteran and global security expert who studies domestic terrorism and active shooters. "We are also trying to use normal rational thoughts to define an irrational act, which is why we focus on them so much. But we will never understand why people like the Las Vegas gunman do what they do."

Jaclyn Schildkraut, an expert on mass shootings research and assistant professor of public justice at the State University of New York, warned that the copycat effect is only getting worse.



"With the amount of coverage Parkland received, you probably will see an uptick," said Schildkraut. "Copycatters are becoming a public safety issue."

