Posted on 04/07/2002 11:42:33 PM PDT by Skibane
Why did you hear about Peter Odighizuwa, who killed three in a law school shooting, but not about Tracy Bridges, who stopped him with a handgun?
America’s First Freedom Magazine
April 2002 Issue, p. 28
By Blaine L. Smith
The mainstream media’s mantra often seems to be, “Ignore The Facts, And They’ll Go Away.” But not this time. The media’s cut-and-paste journalism has once again failed to portray the truth, quite possibly endangering lives with its misleading reporting.
On Jan. 16, it happened again.
At the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Va., a student who learned he would be suspended again for poor grades went on a murderous rampage, killing Dean L. Anthony Sutin and Professor Thomas Blackwell. He then walked downstairs, killed a student, Angela Denise Dales, and injured three others.
Of course, statistics show that “school shootings”, while receiving hours of reporting from the mainstream media, are actually very rare. And such a shooting at a law school is all but unheard of — certainly not a repeat occurrence.
No, what happened again, and is quite notable, is that the mainstream media ignored or covered up another case of a citizen using a firearm to stop a crime in action.
In the case of the Grundy shooting, the killer, an American citizen from Nigeria, was stopped in his attack by another student with a gun. The media’s widespread omission of the fact that a private citizen with a gun undoubtedly saved many lives is simply too blatant to ignore.
Here’s the story: Tracy Bridges, a student at the school and former police officer from North Carolina, heard the shooting while waiting for class to begin. He and another student, Ted Besen, quickly led their classmates down a back staircase.
Once outside, Bridges stopped at this vehicle, retrieved a pistol, and approached the shooter, Peter Odighizuwa. Upon seeing the pistol, Odighizuwa dropped his gun and held up his hands. Bridges, along with several other students, including former officer Mikael Gross, who had also retrieved a handgun, then physically restrained Odighizuwa until police arrived.
“I feel he dropped his weapon because we were armed,” Bridges later told America’s First Freedom.
Prevarication and Cover-up
But how were we, the American public, to know that? While mainstream media were quick to point out all the details of the killer’s gun, right down to the manufacturer and caliber, mention of Bridges’ gun was virtually nonexistent.
According to John Lott, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of More Guns, Less Crime, of the 280 news stories worldwide reporting on the event the following week (from a computerized Nexis-Lexis search), a mere FOUR stories alluded to the fact that the students had stopped the attack by arming themselves.
Major web sites didn’t do much better. Dave Kopel, research director at the Independence Institute, found that only FoxNews and MSNBC reported complete accounts of the events at the Grundy law school. Others glossed over the fact that a gun was used to stop the shooting.
Instead of reporting the truth—that a peaceable citizen used a privately-owned firearm for good purpose—newspapers like The new York Times the Washington Post and USA Today also fell in line to reflect more “politically correct” versions of events at the Appalachian School of Law. They “reported” that Bridges and his friends merely “helped subdue”, “tackled” or “overpowered” the murdered; that, “Students ended the rampage by confronting and then tackling the gunman, who dropped his weapon.”
Was it really that easy? Do deranged gunmen, outnumbered at least 4-1, simply drop their guns at the first sign of confrontation to engage in a wrestling match?
Pushing An Agenda
The morning following the attack, Bridges appeared on NBC’s Today Show to discuss the shooting with Katie Couric. Bridges described his actions in detail, including the fact that he retrieved a firearm from his vehicle, then confronted the shooter with it and ended the attack.
Did Couric somehow miss the gun mention? Did she experience a kind of temporary mental lapse that somehow caused her not to hear the plain truth coming from Bridges’ lips? Was she somehow so distracted by other factors that the mention of the gun managed to slip past her?
The answer is no. Couric, known to push her own anti-gun agenda under the guise of “news reporting”, simply chose not to ask the obvious follow-up questions concerning the beneficial use of the firearm. Instead, she quickly footnoted Bridges’ statement about arming himself with a tidy little retort that summed up the anti-gunners fallacy that only police officers, not citizens, can successfully protect themselves with a firearm.
“I should mention Tracy that you are a police officer...”, Couric immediately said after Bridges mentioned his gun. “It must have been incredibly fortuitous that you all had police training and a police background and you were able to act in such a quick and appropriate way.”
Bridges, on the other hand, is given to a more realistic attitude toward the entire episode.
“The only thing police training gave me was the instinct to act, being safe in what we were doing,” Bridges told America’s First Freedom. “Anyone could have done the same thing.”
But it was Bridges and several fellow students who did act that day, and their heroics have been all but ignored by the media for the sake of cowardly distortion of the truth. It’s another glaring example of mainstream media turning away from the basic principles and confessed ideology of the profession of journalism.
On the same morning, Besen and Daniel Boyd, another student who had helped subdue the gunman after he had dropped his gun, appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America to discuss the events of the previous day. No mention was made of the firearms used by Bridges and Gross to stop the killer. And no questions were asked by the hosts that might have led to the truth.
Same Old Story
This abandonment of the basic strictures of reporting by the major media is nothing new, especially when it comes to reporting on the defensive use of firearms—or rather, the lack of reporting.
As the Grudny incident proves, the media are actively pursuing a point of view that obscures the factual utility of a firearm for self-defense. That’s why so many Americans find it hard to believe Gary Kleck, Florida State University criminologist, and his well-documented study proving there are up to 2.5 million defensive gun uses every year.
Even more importantly, the media also totally ignores Kleck’s finding, noted in his book. Targeting Guns, that firearms are used “three to five times as often for defensive purposes as for criminal purposes.”
Such proof becomes a tiny, shining truth within the mainstream media’s giant vacuum of deception. An overwhelming number of people are denied this knowledge by the media. Yet on an hourly basis, these same people are fed a steady diet of reporting concerning the improper and illegal use of firearms by criminals.
An Anti-Gun Agenda
One can only surmise what the actual intentions of this blatant misrepresentation might be. Are the mainstream media so deep in the back pocket of the gun control movement that demagoguery above truth is the order? Have reporters and editors become so wrapped up in politics that the idea of “public enlightenment” and “reporting the truth”—two mainstays of so-called journalistic ethics—must be pushed to the sidelines? Have mainstream journalists become so jaded that not even one working for a major newspaper or network will speak up if it somehow funs counter to his or her political leanings?
Whatever the intention, the facts concerning positive uses of firearms to stop assaults and other crimes are being hidden deeper and deeper among half-truths, which themselves are closer to fiction than reality. The simple truth is that people are endangered by these misrepresentations.
Are we to believe that, in a case like the Appalachian Law School shooting, a lunatic on a murderous rampage will simply throw his weapon down and wait to be “overpowered”? It’s not likely. Yet that is exactly what the media would have us believe.
Hypothetically, what if a similar shooting were to occur some day in a similar setting? And what if onlookers, who had followed the “reporting” of Appalachian students “tackling” a mad man with a gun, decide to try their hand at overpowering another mass murderer? What if these heroes were killed as a result of a preconceived notion fostered by misleading reporting? Wouldn’t the media be at least partially responsible for such an occurrence?
Have We Learned Nothing?
One of the most startling revelations of the unfortunate event in Grundy comes from Tracy Bridges himself, the hero of this story; one who was brave enough to act, and who had the foresight to act in a reasonable and effective way.
Bridges saw first-hand the workings of the mainstream media in a situation where a gun was used for good. What he saw was a wake-up call to him, and should be to us all.
“What I learned the most (from this incident), was about the media,” Bridges said. “They gave the impression that we just tackled (Odighizuwa). That could lead people to act in an unsafe way.
“They wanted to leave the gun out of the story, and they did.”
For education and discussion purposes only.
If there were more concealed carry permits around, I would bet that there would be fewer crimes committed as well, but that is another story.
((((ping))))
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