On Thursday, Virginia State Trooper Chad Dermyer, 37, was assassinated while in attendance at a police training session by a murderous criminal and self-confessed cop-hater, but the media are shifting the focus to gun laws and the NRA.

Dermyer was shot point-blank in the chest at a Richmond, Va. Greyhound bus station by 34-year-old James Brown III (now deceased after troopers returned fire). According to an interview with the man's aunt, Brown had a passion for "the criminal side." She told a local CBS affiliate:

He had a lot of anger about the police in the past. He pretty much thought he wanted to be infamous… in terms of having a showdown. He always praised those people who got into shootouts with police.

A prior mugshot from Brown's criminal past was posted by Richmond's NBC12 reporter Colleen Quigley:

NBC News blandly reported that Dermyer was shot at a bus station by someone perceived as "mentally disturbed" and assured that the station will be reopened by Friday afternoon.

Yahoo News also reported on the "bus station shootout," hosting the AFP's agenda-laden hit piece against "lax gun laws" and the NRA. There is no way to miss it, as the "powerful gun lobby" is mentioned twice:

A police officer and a gunman have died after a shootout at a bus station in the US state of Virginia -- home of America's powerful gun lobby…

Virginia's gun laws are relatively lax, and the state is home to the National Rifle Association, the powerful pro-gun lobby.

A Reuters story, also hosted at Yahoo News, mentions nothing about Brown other than he was "combative."

And even New York's ABC 7 couldn't be bothered to dig any further into Brown's past or try and find out a motive for the shooting. Instead, they recalled Trooper Dermyer's previous rescue of a lost dog running around an interstate that turned him into a "mini-celebrity" for a moment. A nice memory no doubt, but entirely insignificant to reporting the fact that his murderer was hell-bent on taking out cops in a shootout.