Here is a safe and effective way to stop school mass murders
that goes widely unreported due to the personal anti-self-defense
bias of news reporters, editors and directors. That this
proven alternative is too often censored is a disservice to the
community and to the discussion of stopping and preventing murder.
How many more people will lose their lives because they are denied
access to the means of self-defense? If you are truly interested
in saving lives, I urge you to cover all the possible solutions
including proven, safe and effective self-defense.
Jeff Chan
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[excerpted under fair use]
[http://www.courier-journal.com/cjextra/schoolshoot/SCHthefacts.html]
Who, What, Where, When
Facts and Memories
The Courier-Journal
Sunday, December 6, 1998
[...]
The Mississippi Shooting
The Facts
WHEN: Wednesday, Oct. 1, 1997, about 8 a.m. as school was
opening.
WHERE: Pearl High School in Pearl, Miss. The shootings
occurred in the commons area, a huge lobby that becomes the
school's cafeteria during lunch.
WHAT HAPPENED: Luke Woodham, 16, killed his mother about
5 that morning, then just before 8, he drove her car to school.
He walked through the school's front doors, concealing a .30-30
hunting rifle under a long trench coat. After entering the lobby,
he walked over to his former girlfriend, Christina Menefee, and
her friend Lydia Dew and shot them dead. He then shot into a
crowd of other students before running to the parking lot and
getting into his car. He tried to drive away, but was blocked by
fleeing students. Joel Myrick, the assistant principal, who had
run to his own car and retrieved his .45-caliber handgun,
pointed the pistol at Woodham and made him get out. Myrick
held the gun to Woodham's neck until officers arrived.
Police also arrested six other students who were in a group with
Woodham that reportedly planned to kill even more students,
then go live in Cuba. Two of those students, Justin Sledge and
Grant Boyette, have been charged with assessory. Their trials
are pending. Prosecutors dropped charges against the other four
boys because they withdrew from the group before the
shootings.
__
[http://www.aasa.org/SA/oct9805.htm]
October 1998, Number 9 Vol. 55
The Eye of the Storm: One Year Later
By William H. Dodson
Superintendent, Pearl Public Schools, Pearl, Miss.
No one ever told me 30 years ago that teaching and school
administration would be easy, and I never expected it to be. I
knew it would offer challenges and its share of problems but
figured the opportunity to make a positive difference in the
lives of teen-agers was compelling enough to pursue such a
career.
As superintendent in a small Mississippi town, I have seen so
much more of both elements than I ever imagined. The
rewards have far exceeded my expectations, but so have the
challenges. In my first administrative role as an assistant
principal in an inner-city high school in the Mississippi Delta,
my duties involved breaking up racial fights, mediating student
conflicts, resolving problems from student walkouts and
meeting with angry parents. Plenty of time was spent on court
appearances and civil rights battles.
But nothing could prepare me for the events of Oct. 1,
1997--the day Luke Woodham, a 16-year-old sophomore,
walked into Pearl High School with a 30-30 hunting rifle
concealed under his coat and began shooting. Woodham
deliberately shot point blank the two students he had chosen to
kill. As he continued to fire indiscriminately in the commons
area, where students gather at the start of each morning, seven
additional students were wounded while attempting to flee the
gunfire.
While the shooting was in progress, Woodham was
apprehended in a heroic act by Joel Myrick, an assistant
principal. Myrick had slipped out of the commons area, ran to
his car, grabbed his military weapon and apprehended the
shooter outside the school building as he tried to leave the
campus.
[...]
__
[http://www.courttv.com/trials/woodham/061098.html]
Mississippi v. Luke Woodham
School Shooting Trial Opens
HATTIESBURG, MISS., June 10 --
Testimony was emotional in the first day
of Luke Woodham's school shooting
trial as eyewitnesses to the incident
relived the rampage.
Jurors heard chilling testimony from 19
witnesses, mostly students, who
described how Woodham entered the
commons area of Pearl High School on Oct. 1, 1997 and
opened fire on the students in the area. One of the most
dramatic moments of the day came from assistant
principal Joel Myrick, who subdued Woodham at
gunpoint after the incident. Myrick described how he had
heard gunshots that day and saw students running as
bodies lay everywhere. He said he went to his car,
retrieved his handgun, and loaded it. When Myrick
returned, he waited until Woodham exited the school and
went to his car. Woodham then ran the car into a tree.
According to witnesses, [Myrick] then approached Woodham,
pointed his gun at him, told him to drop his weapon and
exit the car. Myrick then searched Woodham for other
weapons[...]
__
[http://www.nealknox.com/fc/1997/fc11-23-97.txt]
Principal's Gun Saves Lives
By NEAL KNOX
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Oct. 29) -- The nation was horrified when
16-year-old Luke Woodham walked into his Pearl, Mississippi, High
School with a .30-30 hunting rifle, shot to death his ex-
girlfriend and her close friend, then shot and wounded seven
other students.
Then the nation learned Woodham had stabbed his mother to
death earlier that morning.
Then the nation learned that the local prosecutor had
charged six more students with having conspired in the killings
as part of a Satanic plot.
What most of the nation never learned was that Assistant
Principal Joel Myrick, using his own gun, stopped the killer as
he tried to flee the school.
The news media virtually ignored the fact that an armed
citizen had possibly prevented more bloodshed -- using a gun
possessed in violation of the Federal Gun-Free School Act, which
prohibits firearms within 1,000 feet of a school.
To find out what happened I talked to the school's
principal, Roy Balantine.
Mr. Balantine said when he heard the shots he ran into the
hall and "saw a kid with a gun," then immediately called 911.
Mr. Myrick, he said, was in his office on the opposite side of a
"commons" that the school surrounds.
Myrick also had run into the hall and seen a student with a
rifle; he shoved several students into his office and locked the
door, then ran toward the shooting.
He saw Woodham shoot and wound one of the students -- and
Woodham saw him, so Myrick jumped back out of the line of sight.
That's when, Mr. [Balantine] told me, "Mr. Myrick remembered
that he had been out to visit his parents over the weekend, and
that he remembered that he had forgotten to take his gun out of
his pickup.
"So Mr. Myrick ran across the commons and out the back door
and got the gun, and loaded it, then came around the side of the
building."
At that point, Mr. Balantine said, he saw the student pull
out of the school parking lot and pull up behind a car that was
stopped at a stop sign. As Myrick ran toward the car, Woodham
pulled around the stopped car, but spun out and off the road.
Before he could get the car going again, Myrick was there
with the .45 pointed in Woodham's face, demanding "Why did you do
that?"
That's when Woodham "instantly became a coward," Myrick had
told one local reporter.
Woodham must have feared that Myrick would shoot him for he
stammered, so Mr. Balantine told me, "Oh, Mr. Myrick; I'm the one
who gave you the discount on the pizza last week."
Myrick got Woodham out of the car, made him lie on the
ground, pulled his coat over his head and kept one foot on his
back until police arrived.
Woodham's rifle was in the car, and he still had 30 rounds.
"With all that ammunition, we don't know what he might have
done," Mr. Balantine told me. "We don't know if he would've gone
to the junior high or the pizza parlor where he worked, or what.
There's reason to believe he might not've been through killing."
"I'm just thankful that Mr. Myrick had the presence of mind
to remember his gun and bring it all to a stop."
Amen, Mr. Balantine. Police and local reporters are
convinced that Woodham was a member of a satanic cult that had
been ritually sacrificing animals and planning killings before
fleeing to Mexico.
But predictably, there's a bit of a flap in Mississippi
about the "terrible fact" that this vice principal had a gun at
school, and that he was violating the gun-free school law (which
the Supreme Court struck down but Congress reinstated last year).
Under Mississippi law he could legally have a gun in his
car.
I'm thankful he had it, and asked Mr. Balantine to thank him
for me and those of us who admire his courage -- and for setting
a clear example of a gun being used to save lives.
Further, I told him, if the U.S. Attorney or anyone else
wants to give Mr. Myrick any legal troubles, to give me a call
and I'd be delighted to start a defense fund.
__
[http://www.old-yankee.com/rkba/armc598.html]
The American Rifleman, May 1998, The Armed Citizen
(citing the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, MS)
Alarmed at the sound of gunfire in the halls of his Pearl, Mississippi,
high school, Assistant Principal Joel Myrick ran to his car to retrieve a
pistol. The shooter was an armed student who marched through the
school firing on his fellow classmates and teachers. The assailant's
efforts to escape the scene ground to a halt when another student used
his own vehicle to force the suspect's white car into the grass, where it
spun to a stop. Myrick used the delay to catch up to the armed student
and hold him for police. Pearl schools Superintendent Bill Dodson
said of Myrick, "We think he's a hero for keeping more lives from
being lost. The young man with the gun still had rounds in the rifle and
could have injured other people." (The Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, MS,
10/2/97)
__
[http://www.gunowners.org/nws9805.htm]
Access to guns saves lives
Furthermore, John R. Lott Jr., law professor at the University of
Chicago, points out that there is a societal down side to more and more
laws limiting access to firearms and laws restricting where people can
carry firearms.
"Consider a fact hardly mentioned during the massive new coverage of
the October 1997 shooting spree at a high school in Pearl, Miss.,"
Professor Lott wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal piece.
"An assistant principal [Joel Myrick] retrieved a gun from his car
and physically immobilized the gunman for a full four and a half
minutes while waiting for the police to arrive. The gunman had
already fatally shot two students (after earlier stabbing his
mother to death). Who knows how many lives the assistant
principal saved by his prompt response?"
