Personally, I think the Media should be banned

In his review of the Van Sant movie, Elephant, Roger Ebert put forth a very strong argument that the breast-beating media, the very souls calling for a ban on all "assault" weapons, are at very least culpable in the mass shootings we've seen crop up in the last 20 years. I can remember the round-the-clock glorification of the two Columbine shooters, thinking at the time, that if there were any nutjobs on the fence about attacking their schools, they'd be jumping off it soon. What evil, dark-hearted loser can resist going out in a blaze of glory knowing that his name would be household knowledge coast-to-coast? Read the whole thing and then tell me the media shouldn't shoulder some responsibility.
(Ultimate and final responsibility rests on the shoulders of those who pull the triggers, don't get me wrong.)

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

Full review here.