I wrote this article over ten years ago, on Jan. 28, 2012. It was published Feb. 4, 2002 in The (Virginia Beach) Virginian-Pilot
, the Commonwealth's largest newspaper.
Give
the media credit; they know how to selectively report a story. Covering
last year's EP-3 reconnaissance plane crash, Communist China's People's
Daily failed to mention Chinese pilot Wong Wei frequently buzzed
American aircraft and likely rammed the slower plane. Cuba's Granma
conveniently neglected to report that Elian Gonzales' supposedly
loving father rarely saw the child prior to Elian's escape to the
United States.
And just this month The Washington Post and other news outlets
purposefully did not report that two armed students stopped the
tragic shooting at Virginia's Appalachian School of Law.
The story itself is newsworthy. When Peter Odighizuwa began his
deadly rampage, most students fled the premises in fear of their
lives. Two students, however, bravely faced the armed maniac determined
to end the killing. Tracy Bridges, 25, and Mikael Gross, 34 retrieved
guns from their cars and with the help of police officer Ted Besen
surrounded Odighizuwa. Bridges aimed his weapon at Odighizuwa, who
dropped his and was tackled. Had Bridges and Gross obeyed the federal
"gun free schools" law, Odighizuwa would have continued
his deadly rampage, killing with impunity while unarmed citizens
waited for the government's monopoly on force, the local police,
to arrive and resolve the situation.
Given the fact that their actions saved countless lives, the omission
of that critical fact is stunning. Had the men attempted to subdue
Odighizuwa, at least one almost certainly would have been shot at
point-blank range. A more likely scenario is a crazed Odighizuwa
moving through the campus' buildings killing all those he came across
as hundreds fled, powerless to stop him.
The fact that two men put their lives at risk and were able to
heroically save numerous other students only because they had firearms
is central to the story. But somehow it fell through the mainstream
media's gaping editorial cracks.
The silence is deafening. In last Friday's New York Post, the American
Enterprise Institute's Dr. John Lott reports that of the 280 news
reports identified by Lexis-Nexis search engines, only four reported
that two of the students who stopped the mass killing were armed.
When only 1.4 percent of news stories mention the fact that those
who stopped a potential massacre did so with firearms, that can't
be chalked up to the constraints of a word count.
"In this age of 'gun free schools,' the vast majority of the
news reports ignored the fact that the attack was stopped by two
students who had guns in their cars," wrote Lott. Considering
the sensationalized coverage afforded shootings by hostile armed
students, it is disturbing to hear the silence surrounding peaceful
armed students who heroically stop mass killings. While the minute
handful who discharge weapons in schools are afforded days of network
news coverage, stories on the two million defensive uses of firearms
are found only in the newsletter of Gun Owners Of America and the
local police blotter.
Lott's research shows Bridges' and Gross' actions aren't unusual.
In his best seller More Guns, Less Crime, Lott finds that peaceable
citizens use firearms to stop crimes more than two million times
a year. In over 90 percent of those cases the gun is not even fired.
Just the remote threat of a citizen using deadly force to defend
his life and property is enough to quell a criminal's desires. Odighizuwa
may have been deranged, but he was certainly rational enough to
realize he was no match for an armed citizen.
For their efforts, the media still have a hard time restraining
evidence that gun control causes crime and that an armed society
is a polite society. The normally far-left BBC begrudgingly reported
this month that handgun crime in Great Britain has increased 40
percent, despite a 1997 ban on handguns.
Despite that momentary
lapse of anti-gun editorial judgment, the truth about gun ownership
-- a firearm in the hands of peaceful citizen stops crime and saves
lives -- goes largely unnoted.
Luckily, the proliferation of cable news channels and Internet-based
information sources is breaking the media's anti-Second Amendment
news monopoly. Pro-gun organizations such as Gun Owners of America
and Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership dutifully note,
record and report statistics, evidence and first-hand accounts of
lives saved by unabridged firearms ownership.
Declining crime rates in concealed-carry states embarrassingly
refute years of anti-gun propaganda. And stories like that of Bridges
and Gross, however underreported, trickle into the mainstream, proving
that guns save lives and gun control breeds crime.
Bridges and Gross should be commended for their bravery and selflessness.
Those reporters and editors who intentionally failed to note they
could only do so because they chose to exercise a constitutional
right should be ashamed.
