I came across an article posting the phases of the Moon on the day of the shooting spree at Aurora on July 20th and Newtown on December 14 th.
Here are the Visuals.
You may note the identical images for the day.
Is there a correlation between Human Behavior and the Phases of the Moon?
Psychotic activity peaks during the Full and New Moon.
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At the University of Miami, psychologist Arnold Lieber and his colleagues decided to test the old belief of full-moon ?lunacy? which most scientists had written off as an old wives? tale. The researchers collected data on homicide in Dade County (Miami) over a period of 15 years ? 1,887 murders, to be exact. When they matched the incidence of homicide with the phases of the moon, they found, much to their surprise, that the two rose and fell together, almost infallibly, for the entire 15 years! As the full or the new moon approached, the murder rate rose sharply; it distinctly declined during the first and last quarters of the moon.
To find out whether this was just a statistical fluke, the researchers repeated the experiment using murder data from Cuyahoga County in Ohio (Cleveland). Again, the statistics showed that more murders do indeed occur at the full and new moons.
Dr. Lieber and his colleagues shouldn?t have been so surprised. An earlier report by the American Institute of Medical Climatology to the Philadelphia Police Department entitled ?The Effect of the Full Moon on Human Behavior? found similar results. That report showed that the full moon marks a monthly peak in various kinds of psychotically oriented crimes such as murder, arson, dangerous driving, and kleptomania. People do seem to get a little bit crazier about that time of the month.
That?s something most police and hospital workers have known for a long time. Indeed, back in eighteenth-century England, a murderer could plead ?lunacy? if the crime was committed during the full moon and get a lighter sentence as a result. Scientists, however, like to have a hard physical model to explain their discoveries, and so far there isn?t a fully accepted one. Dr. Lieber speculates that perhaps the human body, which, like the surface of the earth, is composed of almost 80 percent water, experiences some kind of ?biological tides? that affect the emotions. When a person is already on psychologically shaky ground, such a biological tide can push him or her over the edge.
BLOODY MOON
Crimes and violence aren?t the only things affected by the 29+ day full moon cycle. In the Journal of the Florida Medical Association, Dr. Edson J. Andrews writes that in a study of 1,000 tonsillectomies, 82 percent of postoperative bleeding crises occurred nearer the full than the new moon ? despite the fact that fewer operations were performed at that time! Clearly, the full moon is a dangerous time for surgery, and the dissemination of this knowledge should result in planning operations for the new moon.
Phases of the Moon are said to affect the bleeding of women during menstrual cycle and patients are reported to bleed more if Surgeries are performed.
Read from Wiki.
Scientific research on the theory
Some studies seem to offer limited support for lunar effects, but most fail to show any relationship between the phase of the moon and abnormal behaviour,[16] and meta-analyses have revealed that apparently significant results are likely to be statistical anomalies rather than indicative of a real effect.[17] In general, apparent positive findings have tended to be inconclusive, contradicted by other studies, or shown to be the result of statistical errors. For example, one study found a statistically significant correlation between lunar phase and hospital admissions due to gastrointestinal bleeding, but researchers acknowledged that the wide variation in the number of admissions throughout the lunar cycle limited the interpretation of the results.[18] Two other studies found evidence that those with mental disorders generally exhibit periods of increased violent or aggressive episodes during the full moon,[19][20] but a more recent study found no such correlation.[21] An analysis of mental-health data found a significant effect of moon phase, but only on schizophrenic patients.[22] Nor are such effects necessarily related directly to the behaviour of the moon. A study into epilepsy found a significant negative correlation between the mean number of seizures and the fraction of the moon illuminated by the sun, but this correlation disappeared when the local clarity of the night sky was controlled for, suggesting that it was the brightness of the night that influenced the occurrence of epileptic seizures.[23]
A reported correlation between moon phase and the number of homicides in Dade County was found, through later analysis, not to be supported by the data and to have been the result of inappropriate and misleading statistical procedures.[17]
Three studies carried out between 1959 and 1973 reported a 1 percent increase in births in New York following a full moon. However, a 1957 analysis of 9,551 births in Danville, PA, found no correlation between birth rate and the phase of the moon,[24] and a 2001 analysis of 70,000,000 birth records from the National Center for Health Statistics revealed no correlation between an increased birth rate and the full moon phase.[25]
A fifteen month study in Jacksonville, Florida revealed no lunar effect on crime or hospital room admittance.[26]
A meta-analysis of thirty-seven studies that examined relationships between the moon’s four phases and human behavior revealed no significant correlation. The authors found that, of twenty-three studies that had claimed to show correlation, nearly half contained at least one statistical error.[17]
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