Ammoland by John Lott
Heroic citizens stopping someone from killing a large number of people don’t seem to be considered news worthy.
Don’t people want to read about a brave soul risking his life by
running towards the sound of gunfire while others run away? Yet, such
stories never get national news coverage by the national mainstream
media.
While accidental gunshots get national coverage, few people have any
idea how often concealed handgun permit holders stopping mass killings.
The lack of news coverage allows left wing media outlets, such as Mother Jones which should know better, to falsely claim: “In not a single case was [a mass public shooting] stopped by a civilian using a gun.”
The truth is that the more successful these heroes are in preventing
people from getting killed, the less media coverage they receive, but
the lack of fatalities doesn’t explain the lack of news coverage. And
if the heroes hadn’t been there, the attacks would have been successful
and the national mainstream media would have been talking about the
attack for days.
It's thoroughly dishonest, as we've come to expect, for John Lott to pretend the lack of coverage of stopped mass killings is because of media bias. It's simply and obviously because there's no proof that something which hasn't happened yet, would have happened.
Having said that, it's also unfair for Mother Jones to imply that no mass shooting has ever been thwarted.
It seems to me that the handful of anecdotal cases cited in the article are just that, a handful of anecdotal cases. The numbers would not add up to much - but of course, no one knows.
