It looks like this best practice goes right out the window if the shooter has a controversial gender identity.

Mass shooters — school shooters, in particular — are often motivated by their desire to achieve notoriety in death. Social science supports this contention. Prevention-focused strategies predicated on this observation are available to law enforcement and institutional administrators. Indeed, it is such a non-controversial claim that journalistic best practice emerged at the end of the last decade in which media outlets were encouraged to, as much as practically possible, “avoid naming the gunmen in mass shootings.” Thus, in their more lucid moments, would-be killers and copycats might realize that they will be deprived of the posthumous fame they seek.

Dozens of legacy media outlets declared their fealty to this new convention. “They want to be famous,” one criminologist told the Associated Press. “So the key is to not give them that treatment.” NPR managing editor, Gerry Holmes, agreed. “We focus on the victims of any mass shooting,” he said, “and we don’t want to give any suspected shooter additional notoriety they may be seeking.” And some peer-reviewed research has begun to suggest that there is “a connection between the number of people killed in a mass shooting and the number of times the news media report the perpetrators’ name” — one observed by a reduction in the number of mass shootings commensurate with declining references to their perpetrators in media products.

Well, it looks like this best practice goes right out the window if the shooter has a controversial gender identity.

It would be difficult to conceive of a more demonic act than the one that was visited on the school children who were praying inside a church when their killer came for them. Today, two children are dead. Seventeen more are injured — the parishioners’ ages ranging from their 80s to just six years old. So much of the coverage of this incident has, however, been consumed by the culture war surrounding transgenderism in which both sides of an issue that consumes social media (and the newsrooms that fixate on it) leveraged the bloodshed in Minneapolis for partisan political gain. Amid this frivolous skirmish, the convention that proscribes naming the shooter has become collateral damage.

You’ll find “Robin Westman’s” name reproduced in USA Today’s account of “What we know about Minneapolis shooting suspect Robin Westman” no fewer than eleven times, including the headline and subhead. ABC News outdid them with 14 mentions. On one side of the ledger, you have news outlets diving into the “national debate” that the shooter inspired (what a  success!) with this act of wanton bloodlust, and CNN hosts and guests agonizing over the pronouns this monster preferred. On the other, there’s outlets like the New York Post, which latched onto a nugget in the killer’s addled manifesto (another success!) regretting how transgenderism “brain-washed” him.

News consumers could be forgiven for concluding the most important aspect of this evil act was the killer’s identity. I guarantee you that’s what those who suffer from the same disordered mindset that plagued this killer are thinking.

The experts assure us that transgender shooters are “extremely” rare. Indeed, they are. But when the statistics are stripped of suicides, arrest-related events, and errant gunfire, genuine mass school shootings are also rare. We now have two in nearly as many years. And while the experts also caution against assuming that all who struggle with gender dysphoria suffer from mental illness, it does us no favors to pretend as though mental health issues are not disproportionately pronounced among those who identify as transgender.

Public-facing institutions, like the press, should evince more (some?) social responsibility when reporting on events like these. If the data is right, this sort of coverage will produce more mass shooters so long as those shooters can lay claim to an identity that will be disputed by America’s culture warriors. That is the conclusion these very media outlets themselves reached not long ago. They know they’re playing with fire, but the incentives to risk more bloodshed are just too tempting to resist.

But to do so would be to subordinate the hunger for total political combat in America’s newsrooms and among its influencers to prudence, circumspection, and basic civic decency. There’s no time for that. Haven’t you heard? There’s a culture war on.