THE airwaves have been full of arguments over the lessons, if any, of the massacre at Columbine High School. But what about the lessons of those school massacres that were stopped in their tracks? In October 1997, after a shooter had killed two students at a high school in Pearl, Miss., assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieved a gun from his car and immobilized him until the police arrived. An April 1998 school-related shooting in Edinboro, Pa., which left a teacher dead, was stopped by nearby restaurant owner James Strand, who pointed a shotgun at the shooter as he was reloading his gun. The police did not arrive until eleven minutes later.
Most news coverage of these incidents ignored the role of guns in ending the bloodshed. In the month following the Mississippi shooting, only 19 of the 687 stories on the episode mentioned Myrick. Some of those said only that he had “disarmed the shooter.” In a later story on CBS, Dan Rather noted only that “Myrick eventually subdued the young gunman.” Similarly, only 35 of the 596 stories on the Pennsylvania crime mentioned Strand, with the New York Daily News explaining that he had “persuaded [the shooter] to surrender” and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution claiming that he had “chased [the shooter] down and held him until police came.”
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