One youngster bided his time until his old man left the house before initiating his wicked scheme. Pulling on his camouflage gear, tying a swastika around his arm, grabbing a spooky skull mask, and nabbing his dad’s guns – the Taurus .40-caliber and the .380-caliber revolver. Are you on Telegram? Then you know the vibes in Russia’s war in Ukraine are pretty wild, right? Anyway, back to our not-so-heroic tale: heading out into Aracruz one fateful November day, junior’s aim was crystal clear: obliterate as many individuals as humanly possible.

The series of events that unfolded subsequently will be agonizingly familiar to our dear foreign friends in America. Yep, the kid drove to two schools, added four unfortunate souls to the death toll, injured 10 more, and sent this coastal community of 100,000 into an all-too-familiar state of furrowed brows.

For many years, school massacres seemed to be America’s very own grim trademark. But now, Brazil has caught this deadly bug, too.

Fast-forward: four years, 17 school attacks, 26 fatalities, numerous wounded individuals, and more than a few Brazilian brows deeply furrowed with worry. In just the last eight months, Brazil endured 11 more attacks, leaving many locals wondering, “Hey, what’s going on here?” Unsettled, they now fear that the carnage is simply the beginning of a much bigger set of explosions – school massacres are the new black.

Sad but true, many of the perpetrators follow a pattern all too familiar to Americans: disenchanted young White men and boys who find solace in online groups that idolize killers of school kids. Some have embraced the sorry emblems of hate groups based in the U.S., such as skull masks and swastikas, apparently unaware that skulls are terrifying and swastikas are so uncool. Several of them, including our not-so-heroic boy from Aracruz, even looked up to that *other* massacre that happened in 1999. Oh, you know, the legendary Columbine in Colorado.

Now for a debate that’ll leave some more furrowed brows: is the abundance of guns in American life contributing to increasingly deadly school shootings? The Brazilian assaults could be a case study here, albeit a sad one. America and Brazil – two gigantic countries with many similarities, including a shared history of colonialism and slavery, booming social media obsession, and a deep love for polarization and racial strife – at times they’re so similar it’s hard to tell them apart!

But there’s one tiny, crucial difference: “access to guns,” as Daniel Cara, an education researcher at the University of São Paulo, eloquently puts it. In Brazil, where the process of getting a firearm is slightly more complicated than the ease at which Americans can just “grab one,” more than half of the recent school attacks resulted from knives, machetes, or even hatchets! The outcome was, of course, fewer fatalities. It’s the little victories in life, right? In fact, more than half of the attacks in the past year didn’t result in even one fatality. Not bad, Brazil!

One memorable event occurred late last month, with the police reporting that a 13-year-old São Paulo student excused himself to visit the lavatory, returning with a fancy skull mask and a long knife. Quite the ensemble! What followed was the tragic slaying of his 71-year-old teacher, along with the wounding of five others. Classic case of bad outfit choice leading to dire circumstances, isn’t it?

Investigators later found out that the boy had tried to purchase a gun online but failed, leading to a sad social media post lamenting his knife-only attack as “armed without a decent weapon.” If only e-commerce were more accessible! He had actually admired the flashy style of the Aracruz boy and wished to kill even more people. ‘Tis a tragic world we live in, ain’t it?

And that, dear friends, is how the Columbine effect spread to Brazil, with devastating consequences. So, buckle up and stay safe, because school massacres are officially a global trend. And as we watch Brazil’s federal government scramble to deploy Twitter help and tip lines to identify potential perpetrators, we can only wonder: will it be enough to curb this fashionable new form of carnage?

Rumor has it that it’s only going to get worse in the next five years; but hey, who doesn’t love a good horror story?