(via Instapundit)  This article from the San Luis Obispo New Times is candidate for most under-reported human interest news story so far in '03.

It’s not often that students jump a gun-toting, teenage nut-ball who’s taken a classroom hostage at gunpoint, then wrestle him to the floor so their high school won’t become synonymous with Columbine and grape Kool-Aid.

Arroyo Grande High students Clay Gheza and Jonathan Griswold did. The kid who’d walked into their sophomore English class on Friday waving a 9 mm pistol with murder in mind was more interested in having a bloody good time than conjugating verbs. If Gheza and Griswold hadn’t grabbed him, we’d probably be attending a lot of funerals this week and I’d be so despairing that you wouldn’t be able to read this column because I wouldn’t be able to write it, and it’d be hard for you to read it anyway, blinking away all those tears.

Everybody in SLO County knows about it, and that’s the problem: Nobody else does. That’s what makes me more annoyed than usual.

Glenn comments:

I don't actually believe that there's a conspiracy among Big Media to constantly present an image of the American public as a bunch of bumbling, helpless boobs in need of constant supervision by the Nanny State, while suppressing all evidence to the contrary. But, you have to admit, its easy to see why some people do think that.

I actually do believe that there's a conspiracy.   Or, maybe ESR's term "prospiracy" is more apropos.   There are a bunch of shared memes our press-class possess and, like driving on the right hand side of the road (or the left if you're in the UK), once set in motion there is trivially little external organization required to maintain a general direction.  They aren't huddled in dark corners whispering commands to each other because they don't need to.

Imagine if these kids were whistle-blowers against their school principal.   Or common-man victims of an oppressive capitalist hegemon who launched a political crusade for freedom -- there would no doubt be more coverage.

It's not what these kids did that prevents them from getting coverage, it's how they did it.   Individual initiative and self-reliance at the mano-a-mano level aren't popular memes in a press infatuated with victim politics and the group movement du jour.   And heroism, particularly of the muscular sort, is passe in a reporting environment of cynicism.   A world view that can't believe that morality and action can come together at the individual level. 

Accepting that individuals can and do the right thing would sure change the tenor of a lot of the conventional wisdom out there.