Inevitable entry on the Virginia Tech murders - UPDATED


Short and to the point

Already the news is full of the Virginia Tech murders. And perhaps inevitably, the focus has shifted to blocking guns.

I have called myself a reluctant gun advocate.

I would like people to think about this.

What would have happened if the gunman had known that some of his victims were armed and willing to fight back?

The whole assumption that makes shooting unarmed students attractive would have been turned on it's head.

And it wouldn't have to be very many armed students. Just the knowledge that there were some would have been a huge deterrent.

That is not something you will see in the mainstream reporting of this tragedy.

Update - I am not the only blogger who thinks that having a few of the other students armed so they could shoot back is a good idea.

But this really caught my eye.

A reminder: if someone commits mass murder with a weapon other than a gun, the national news media usually ignore it. For example, Hector Escudero started a fire at a casino in Puerto Rico in December 1987 as part of labor union activism, and killed 96 people. Julio Gonzalez threw $1 worth of gasoline into an illegal night club in New York City in April 1990 to get back at his girlfriend, and killed 87 people. These stories received almost no national news coverage at the time--while mass murders that were substantially smaller received vastly more coverage. Why? Gonzalez and Escudero's crimes didn't advance the cause of gun control. You can read my paper that was published by the Journal of Mass Media Ethics here for an examination of the role that excessive media coverage played in causing at least one of the mass murders of that era.

So why is it being labeled as the biggest mass murder in American history? One of the cable networks spent most of today calling it exactly that.

Tomorrow, I talk about profiling.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Tue - April 17, 2007 at 01:25 PM  Tag


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