Students are Up in arms about concealed carry law (Oct. 13) partly because of the extreme anti-gun bias in the media, I hope, and not the result of reasoning with facts. Since Professor John R. Lott's book, More Guns, Less Crime, came out a few years ago, there still has been no city, county or state that passed a concealed-carry law whose violent-crime-with-guns rate did not subsequently decrease.
Here is an example that demonstrates the severity of the media bias against guns:
In January 2002 a shooting left three dead at the Appalachian Law School in Virginia. The event made international headlines and produced more calls for gun control. Problem: To produce these results, the media had to lie to their reading audiences. The attack was stopped by two students, Mikael Gross and Tracy Bridges, who had guns in their cars. Both saw what was happening and ran to get their guns. They approached the shooter from different sides with guns aimed on him. Tracy yelled at him to drop his gun and he did. Professor Lott, senior research scholar at Yale's law school, checked out the media coverage of the event and found that 218 stories had been published describing it. Of these, 214 lied to their readers by describing the capture of the shooter by omitting any mention of guns being involved. Tracy Bridges was interviewed by 50 reporters who produced 50 stories that mentioned that the shooter was tackled by a student or otherwise wrestled to submission. Of the 218 stories, only four mentioned that the shooter was halted by two students aiming their guns at him.
It gets worse: When Professor Lott complained to these papers about the omission, the media relations manager at The Associated Press, Jack Stokes, dismissed the accusation that news groups deliberately had downplayed the role gun owners may have played in stopping the shooting. Stokes did reveal the media bias clearly, however, and I am not making this up, as Dave Barry might say. He said, My God
they're putting into jeopardy even more people by bringing out those guns.
-James Lee is an Ohio University professor emeritus residing in Athens. Send him a fax at 593-5393 or send an e-mail to posteditorial@ohiou.edu. 17
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