Well apparently not to most Iowa news reporters. The old adage in reporting is, "If it bleeds, it leads." Apparently the new maxim in reporting is: "If it casts gun owners in a positive light, bury it."
For those of you who don't have press cards stuck in the bands of your fedoras, here's the scoop. According to Cedar Rapids CBS2/FOX28 news (to my knowledge the ONLY mainstream news agency to include the armed civilian good guy aspect of this story):
Five men are in jail after a very scary car chase.The video of the newscast is a little more in-depth and contains interviews with Scott Eastwood, the permit-to-carry holder, and his neighbor Tim Moore who apprehended the five suspects. The story focuses quite a bit on the armed good guy aspect of the story. I highly recommend that you watch news video to get a full feel for the story.
The Linn County Sheriff's office says it all started with a shots fired call in Cedar Rapids and ended with a car crashing into a child's playhouse.
Deputies say, around 7 Wednesday night, they tried to stop a vehicle that matched the description of a car involved in a shots fired call.
They say the driver of the car wouldn't stop so officers chased them all the way to solon.
The chase ended after the car crashed into someone's yard plowing through a child's play house.
That's when the five men got out of the car and took off running; two neighbors saw the commotion and decided to help.
Tim Moore and Scott Eastwood say the five men threw drugs and a gun down in his yard as they ran across the highway.
During the chase, the deputy who was chasing them fell so Tim and Scott got into a truck and continued to chase the men.
The men were eventually caught when the neighbors confronted them and held them there [at gunpoint] until back up arrived.
The important thing to note here is that if it wasn't for CBS2/FOX28 (who share a news room) we might not know at all that the suspected bad guys were apprehended by an armed civilian permit-to-carry holder. None of the other news outlets even mentioned it.
KWWL news (Waterloo) reported: "Five occupants of the vehicle took off on foot, and was [sic] later arrested by police officers." KCCI news (Des Moines) stated simply: "The five males in the truck tried to run from the scene, but they were soon captured."
The "Iowa City Press-Citizen" wrote: "The occupants of the vehicle fled on foot and they were pursued by the Linn County deputy who initiated the chase," [Johnson Co. Sheriff's Office Capt. Gary] Kramer said. With the help of some Solon residents, who alerted officers to the suspects' location, the five individuals were arrested a short distance away on Sutliff Road, Kramer said." [Emphasis added.]
"The Gazette" of Cedar Rapids, which normally is so fascinated by permit-to-carry holders that it periodically publishes their names and addresses when they apply for or renew their permits, yawned from the page: "[F]ive people were apprehended near where the truck crashed after they tried to run from the scene."
We've seen this many times on the national scene, when school shootings or other shooting sprees are stopped by armed civilians. The national news media usually just report that bystanders "subdued" or "disarmed" the gunman, never mentioning that they did so by pointing their own weapons at him.
If an Iowa permit-to-carry holder someday overzealously pulls his pistol on an innocent person or accidentally shoots himself in the leg you can expect a lot of media attention on THAT gun owner. If you're a supporter of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms just remember: No news is good news.
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