Appalachian

Bob Somerby nails Bernard Goldberg's repetition of Lott's false claim that the media deliberately concealed defensive gun use in the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law.

(All of my postings on the shootings at the Appalachian School of law are here.) Lott has a [report of a conversation with Mikael Gross](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/cgi-bin/johnrlott.tripod.com/postsbyday…) on his blog. In The Bias Against Guns Lott claims that Gross pointed his gun at Peter Odighizuwa: Only two local newspapers (the Richmond Times Dispatch and the Charlotte Observer) mentioned that the students actually pointed their guns at the attacker. So does Gross confirm that he pointed his gun at Odighizuwa? Nope. Does he confirm that Bridges pointed his…

On his blog, Lott offers an excuse for the fact that in his book and on his blog he had not mentioned that Ted Besen contradicts Bridges' claim to have used a gun to disarm Odighizuwa: I have gotten an e-mail asking about the role that Ted Besen played in stopping the Appalachian Law School attack during January 2002. While I had seen and referenced a story by Rick Montgomery, a reporter for the Kansas City Star, I hadn't read down to the last couple hundred words of the 1,400 word piece that he drafted in March 2002. Montgomery's piece contains a…

Lott has a posting responding to my comments on his claims that the news coverage of the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law was biased. I wrote: Unfortunately, Lott's counting methodology is flawed, his count missed half of the stories that mentioned the armed students, his version of what happened deliberately omits important facts and omits contradictory accounts from other eye witnesses and his version contains details that appear to have been invented by Lott. Lott has no answer at all to almost all of this, so he just responds to part of the criticism…

After Lott claimed that biased news coverage of the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law deliberately omitted a defensive gun use, I did my own analysis of the news stories and found that the alleged bias was the product of Lott's flawed counting methodology. Lott has posted a spreadsheet listing 295 articles he found on Nexis, and a file containing 249 of those articles. Some of those articles he does not count because they are duplicates. He asserts that the coverage was biased because only 3 out 218 stories mentioned that the attack was stopped…

Lott has an article in the National Review Online where once more misleads his readers about what happened at the Appalachian School of Law: "Last year, two law students with law-enforcement backgrounds as deputy sheriffs in another state stopped the shooting at the Appalachian Law School in Virginia. When the attack started the students ran to their cars, got their guns, pointed their guns at the attacker, ordered him to drop his gun, and then tackled him and held him until police were able to arrive." Lott implies that the law students were former…

Tom Maguire has an interesting post which collects some links to blogspace discussion about the Appalachian Law School shootings. One interesting thing is that Lott and Kopel independently made the same error---they both claimed that the New York Times did not mention the defender's gun when it did. Both errors were particularly egregious. Kopel quoted a sentence from the article but did not notice that the gun was mentioned in the very next sentence. Lott counted the New York Times story as one of the four that mentioned the gun, but also claimed that…

Tom Spencer believes that I have essentially destroyed one of Lott's core arguments and wonders why pro-gun people continue to support him. There are two contradictory stories about what happened at the Appalachian Law School: Besen said that Odighizuwa set his gun and a clip on a light fixture about four feet off the ground before Bridges arrived. Bridges said that he aimed his gun at Odighizuwa and then Odighizuwa "throwed his weapon down". Note that they contradict each other about what Odighizuwa did with his gun. If Besen is correct and Bridges arrived after Odighizuwa…

The centrepiece of Lott's The Bias Against Guns is the story he tells about the shootings at the Appalachian Law School. According to Lott, after killing three people Peter Odighizuwa was almost out of ammunition and was on his way to his car to get more when he was confronted by two armed students, Tracy Bridges and Mikael Gross. When Bridges aimed his gun at Odighizuwa Odighizuwa dropped his gun and was tackled by students. Lott opines that Bridges and Gross "undoubtedly saved many lives". Lott says that the biased media mostly suppressed this story, with…

A couple of weeks ago I described how Lott used his Mary Rosh sock puppet to blame the New York Post for the fact that an article he wrote omitted to mention the fact that the students who captured a school shooter were police officers. A couple of months later, however, in Lott drafted his article again, without mentioning that the students were police officers. So we have proof not only that the Post was not to blame for the omission, but that the omission was quite deliberate and not accidental.

In the Washington Post article Lott says: "I probably shouldn't have done it---I know I shouldn't have done it ---but it's hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously," Well, I can think of one. Last January, the New York Post drafted an opinion piece written by Lott. In that piece Lott claimed that a school shooting had been stopped by students armed with guns and that almost all the newspaper stories had failed to mention this fact, thus demonstrating that the media showed a bias against guns. Next, someone posted the…