Media attention may well be the biggest motivator for such actions, but once someone gives in to their murderous impulses guns make it very easy to kill a lot of people, simply by being highly optimized. You can quickly kill more people with a bomb, but they&#x27;re relatively hard to manufacture and deploy; you can very easily kill someone with a knife or any number of other close-quarters weapons, but it&#x27;s not reliable or efficient to do so. Thus, while soldiers deployed in combat usually have a knife and may well have hand grenades or other explosives, firearms are the primary weapons by a mile.<p>I&#x27;m not in favor of gun confiscation (and don&#x27;t plan on getting into any arguments on gun policy today) but it would be absurd to ignore the technological-economic impact of guns on the production of murder. Suggesting that media eschew reporting the news, even to the point of sensationalizing it, is irrational given both what we know about human behavior and the constitutional safeguards against censorship in the US. To be honest, I think people who blame the media are simply demonstrating their own strong preference for social proof and then projecting that motivation onto murderous individuals. It is very likely a significant factor but I don&#x27;t think we have anywhere near enough data to conclude that it is a primary motivator.