The News Media Is Biased Against the Positive Aspects of Gun Ownership

That being said, I believe that there may be misunderstanding in what I meant by "Positive Aspects". By that, I am referring to instances of defensive gun uses, not cases of citizens keeping their guns safely locked up. Nonetheless, I will show that the media is quick to blame the gun rather than the individual holding the gun, and also prove that DGU (defensive gun use) receives much less coverage in the media, despite the fact that it occurs more commonly than violent crimes committed with guns. In mass acts of public terrorism (ie campus shootings, school shootings, etc. ), the media focuses on the gun rather than the individual(s) involved, and also blatantly omits information and events concerning the positive usage of guns in such situations. In order to prove this point, I intend to present a case study on the 2002 campus shooting at Virginia's Appalachian School of Law. A disgruntled Nigerian student killed the dean, a professor, and another student before being subdued by a group of students. This brief account is the way that most people heard the event, and as a result calls for more gun control were common. Yet one key piece of information is missing from this account: the attacker was subdued not by physical force alone, but by two students grabbing guns from their cars and pointing it at the shooter, then subduing him. In reality, this key fact was hidden from the public by the bias of the news media. Out of 208 stories relating to the incident, a mere four accounts included the fact that the students used guns in the process. 72 had related information that the attacker was stopped by students, but as said before, only four mentioned that guns were involved. As for the ones that chose to omit this key fact? The Washington Post said that they pounced on the gunman until help arrived, without alluding to the fact that the display of guns is what subdued the gunman in the first place. By stark contrast to this minuscule coverage of the positive DGU, 68 of the 208 news articles (including the aforementioned Washington Post one) felt it necessary to detail that the gunman had a ".380 semiautomatic pistol". So, they give the attention to the gun used to commit the crime, which could have been any gun or even a non-gun instrument, yet neglect the key detail of how guns were used in the stoppage of any further loss of life? Furthermore, it can clearly be observed that the media, while not always intentionally, has galvanized public sentiment against guns with its relentless coverage of incidents like the Va Tech shooting, Columbine, Arizona incident with Rep. Giffords, etc. Nearly everyone has heard of these incidents, and in all the coverage the focus centered around how bad guns were and why the perpetrators were able to obtain them. While these incidents are "household names" in terms of mass public terrorism, certain lesser known instances involving shooters being stopped have received considerably less press. Survey any group of Americans, and I guarantee that the public awareness of the incident when "an assistant principal at Pearl High School in Mississippi retrieved his legally owned Colt .45 from his car and stopped a student shooter after that student killed two people" is much less than the Virginia Tech massacre. Or how "at an eighth-grade school dance in Pennsylvania, a boy fatally shot a teacher and wounded two students before the owner of the dance hall brought the killing to a halt with his own gun". Why? By the very nature of the "sensationalized" media, as you called it, it proves much more newsworthy to report incidents with massive losses of life rather than ones with, by news standards, "normal" amounts of deaths which were prevented from escalating by DGU. Within this bias towards the remarkable stories, key instances about positive DGU is less available to the public, and as a result public opinion reflects a prevailing belief that having guns around is a threat and that DGU is an unfeasible course of action. The intensive focus on guns in gun-related instances represents a double standard by the media as well, as opposed to their method of covering non-gun acts of violence. In non-gun acts of violence, the focus somehow seems to shift to the individual and not the instruments they used to commit their deeds. I have yet to hear of any stories which focused on Ryder trucks or ammonium nitrate in the aftermath of the OKC bombings. Nor have I heard of any debates focusing on the knives and buzz saws used in the twisted crimes of Jeffrey. Similarly, there has never been an outpouring of support for a ban on such instruments after these incidents. Instead, media coverage was centered on the past lives of the perpetrators, with almost zero focus on the instruments used to commit the crimes. Even though these instruments were just as important to the crimes as guns were in the Va Tech shooting, the media paid no attention to them, and as a result more public sentiment was felt towards the crimes themselves. By contrast, when people recall the Virginia Tech shootings, they are inclined to bring up the fact that Seung-hei Cho was able to obtain a weapon despite the restrictions. Yet when a similar incident happened on that same campus, involving a student being stabbed, I heard zero articles focused on the dangers of having knives. In summary, while mass murder cases with guns do feature a great deal of coverage about the perpetrators, they also feature an equal, if not greater, amount of coverage on the guns themselves. This greatly differs from the scant attention paid to the instruments of non-gun crimes, even though the Ryder truck and ammonium nitrate was just as important to the OKC bombing as guns were to the cases of school shootings. I believe that in my presented argument, I have clearly exhibited the media's penchant to frame guns as only being used for destruction. This, however, only encompasses the scope of nationally-newsworthy incidents. I intend to further display the logical reasons as to why even the local media features an embedded bias towards broadcasting DGU as opposed to gun incidents where blood is spilled. In the meantime, I await my opponent's responses to my arguments presented thus far. References. http://www.lewrockwell.com... (Excerpt from John Lott's book The Bias against Guns). http://articles.cnn.com...