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A student at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia, who has just been told he will be suspended for failing grades, storms through campus, clutching a handgun.
As terrorized students run for their lives, they hear him say, “Come get me, come get me.” But before anyone can get him, the student, a forty-two-year old immigrant from Nigeria, goes on a shooting spree, killing the dean, a professor, and a fellow student.
He also shoots and wounds three other students–one in the abdomen, one in the throat, and another in the chest.
Finally, as the Washington Post reports, “Three students pounced on the gunman and held him until help arrived.” Later in the story, the Post says, “The students then tackled the gunman.”
John Roberts at CBS News reported the story the very same way: “Three people were killed… before students tackled the gunman.”
At NBC News, Kevin Tibbles said the students “overpowered the gunman and held him until police could arrive.”
The bloody incident happened on January 16, 2002, and was picked up by news organizations all over the country, almost all of which covered the story the way the Washington Post and the networks did. Which means virtually all of them left out one tiny, little fact.
Two of the three students who “pounced on” and “tackled” and “overpowered” the gunman also had guns.
They had them in their cars, and when they heard the gunshots and learned what was happening, they got their guns and used them to subdue the killer who just shot up the campus.
An honest mistake? You decide. Soon after the law school rampage, criminologist and scholar John Lott ran a LexisNexis search on the story and came up with this: Only 4 of 208 news reports that he found mentioned that the rescuers had guns. James Eaves-Johnson did his own Nexis search for the Daily Iowan (at the University of Iowa) and found that just two of eighty-eight stories reported that guns were used to subdue the killer.
Ah, but it gets worse. Many of those newspapers that failed to report the whole story then seized upon the horror at the Appalachian School of Law to editorialize again against handguns.
No matter whose count you use, the fact could not be more clear: Only a tiny handful of reporters in the entire country were willing to report an essential part of the story: that it wasn’t just the killer who used a gun on campus that day, but the rescuers, too.
Bernard Goldberg
“And Now, the Rest of the Story”
Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite
