Heroism

I've held off writing anything about the Tyler, TX, shootings, where a heroic individual, Mark Wilson, paid the ultimate price for intervening in what had all the earmarks of a mass shooting. I'm sure most of you are familiar with the basic story; if you're not, John Lott has collected the most comprehensive stories on his site:

Man dies while trying to stop rampage credited with saving the life of the gunman's son

TYLER, Texas - A 52-year-old manufacturing plant employee, credited with saving another man's life by jumping into the middle of a fierce firefight on a Texas downtown square, was known for taking life "head-on." Friends weren't surprised to hear that Mark Wilson sacrificed his own life byconfronting a gunman firing an AK-47 assault-style rifle Thursday in Tyler, Texas.

A totally selfless act, a moment of pure heroism. Wilson had owned a gun range and been an instructor. With a 9mm Glock, he faced a crazed — and skilled — gunman with an AK-47 clone. Within a second, Wilson must have understood that his position was precarious. But Wilson never hesitated, and he traded his life for the life of innocents. I think that every one of us who carry a gun day in and day out prays to God that should we ever find ourselves in such a hellish situation, we are able to find Mark Wilson's strength and conviction within ourselves.

Two points I want to make over and above the actual incident: You'll notice you didn't see Mark Wilson's friends and relatives on The Today Show or Good Morning America or CNN. You also didn't read newspaper stories about how a heroic man sacrificed himself for people whose names he never knew.

My friends, this is media bias in its most vicious form — America needs to know Mark Wilson's story, that a civilian with a gun bought enough time for the police to get set up. How can Americans truly understand the progun and the antigun side if only one side of the news is reported?

What can you do? Write your local newspaper; write you local television stations, and demand to know why they didn't bother to cover the other half of the story! I'll have more on this later.

The second point I think I'm going to cover in a different post...