The pathetic, attention-starved, girlfriendless loser* who murdered nine and wounded nine more while hunting Christians inside a classroom building at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, was quite clear about his motivations.

Like the gay racist hooker/failed journalist who murdered two former colleagues at Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia during a live broadcast, the spindly-legged, pro-apartheid trailer park loser who shot up a church in Charleston in hopes of triggering a race war, and the demented waste of flesh that murdered children, faculty, and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School hoping for a “high score,” this neutered little nothing of a “man” wanted attention.

He also knew that if he committed a horrific crime, his name would be splashed across the pages of newspapers, magazines, and web sites, that somber-faced news anchors and pundits would delve into his background, and that politicians would seek to draw on the incident to pursue their own selfish gains… for weeks, if not months.

It’s incredibly, mundanely consistent; these losers, and those that preceded them, have turned to violence to seek validation for lives that they feel are wasted. They feel that if they can become infamous anti-heroes or villains, that they will have at least accomplished something in their lives, even if it is only infamy.

The simple, logical and relatively “easy” fix to this sort of fame-seeking crime is for the news media to simply stop covering these crimes, at least in the murderer-glorifying manner that they currently do.

Instead of laws targeting “assault weapons”—an arbitrary, made-up political term—Congress and the President should focus on reigning in news outlets practicing sensationalist “assault journalism,” where major networks and news outlets spend hundreds if not thousands of man-hours dedicated to exploiting tragedy and creating infamy.

Ask any professional journalist, and they’ll tell you: “if it bleeds, it leads.”

Exploiting tragedy is big business. It earns the networks and major news media hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

Predictably, this wall-to-wall coverage inspires more and bloodier attacks, as other pathetic, nihilist little nothings see a chance for infamy.

The left-wing media and their Democrat allies scream for people  control in the wake of each and every one of these incidents, but that isn’t the issue. It has never been the issue. We’ve had much less restrictive firearms laws in the past, and much fewer mass killings.

The firearms industry isn’t responsible for these mass murders.

The murder sensationalism industry is.

Unless we reign in the media’s exploitation of these incidents for profit, they will continue, and they will likely increase in both number and ferocity.

If Congress wants to have an immediate impact on reducing this sort of fame-seeking crime, they simply need to define “common sense” restrictions on how the mainstream media is allowed to report these crimes to defy these would-be assassins the infamy they seek.

Deny these monsters their fame and fleeting relevance, and the attacks will dramatically diminish.

It really is just that simple.

*Bearing Arms does not publish the names of mass or spree killers.

We wish other news outlets would follow our lead.