*shakes head*

I suppose with respect to any saturation coverage event like the massacre at Virginia Tech, most people reach a threshold where they simply overload and say "enough".

For me, I'm pretty sure that moment occurred when some conservative commentators took time out of their day to make the repugnant argument that the victims were a bunch of pussies.

Take John Derbyshire, writing at National Review Online.  If he didn't begin the parade, he at least waved the standard with the most enthusiasm with a post that quickly degenerated from the pathetic to the hallucinatory:

Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness' sake—one of them reportedly a .22.

At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren't very accurate, even at close range. [emphasis in original]

Fertheluvva... That isn't written from the experience of inhabiting any world with which I'm familiar - that's the considered opinion of someone who exists exclusively in a Showtime action flick co-starring Steven Seagal and The Rock.  As I understand Derbyshireland, all red-blooded males come equipped with a mental catalogue of armaments, enabling one to not just identify the weapon being held by the evil bastard who is in the process of shooting at you, but also be familiar with the number of bullets held in the clip, thereby facilitating your efforts at "count[ing] the shots", so that you can rush him in a heroic blaze of glory - presumably accompanied by stirring slow-pan shots and a wicked awesome soundtrack.  Even more bizarre, on the laws of physics qua Derbyshire, is the fact that Cho Seung Hui managed to kill anyone, never mind thirty-three people - seeing as how he was equipped only with "two handguns for goodness' sake".  Clearly </sarcasm>, Cho just wasn't all that lethal.  And yet we've got all these bodies lying around... Strange, that.

While Mark Steyn isn't sure he's "ready to go the full Derb", he is pretty sure that there is a "corrosive passivity" at work in our society - whereby the victims of "murderous misfit loners" (Steyn's words) just didn't have the balls to... I don't know, kick some ass or something.  And what better time than the slaughter of thirty-three innocents to bring up the deficiency of testosterone suffered by "Canadian manhood" (evidenced apparently by the fact that, when Marc Lepine went on his own murderous rampage in Montreal, the men (or "men", on Steyn's formulation) at whom Lepine was pointing his weapons "did nothing".  The fact that the armed man was firing weapons in their general direction evidently doesn't factor in.

Even my friend Kathy Shaidle got in on the act: "when we say "we don't know what we'd do under the same circumstances", we make cowardice the default position".  Well, "cowardice" or "self-preservation" - whichever works for you.  At Victory Soap, we get this:

my first thought was "how the hell can one guy walk around an area full of grown adults, killing at will, with no one stopping him until several people are dead?" ... People wonder why so many apparently meekly lined up for their "execution style" deaths. I don't -- I've had the same public school education everyone else has.

Set aside the gross smear that those who fell prey to Cho's guns "meekly lined up" (really? Did they meekly line up? Or did they desperately fling themselves from fourth floor windows, cower behind barricaded doors and die screaming, weeping and bleeding?).  Ponder how someone can query how "one guy [can] walk around an area full of grown adults, killing at will".  Perhaps because he's armed, dangerous and, permit me to stress this because apparently it isn't sinking in for some people, shooting at them.  With guns and live ammunition.  I'm pretty sure it wasn't my "public school education" that would prompt me to get the hell out of there - it would be my well-honed desire to stay alive.  And feel free to call me a coward - but it would be nice if people would let the bodies at Virginia Tech cool before sneering about their distressing lack of manliness.

I recall when it was some on the left who were clearly working out some daddy issues in public (anyone else remember Bill Maher, among others, criticizing Bush for not "demanding more sacrifices" of them in the wake of 9/11? What was that all about?) - now it appears that both sides of the aisle are a bit put upon.

Maybe Nietzsche really did have it all figured out.  There is a bizarre moral inversion at play here: the posts I linked to had little or nothing to say about the murderer, reserving their ire for the dead - the "meek", "passive", evidently emasculated dead.  So evidently their victim status is compromised.  Or something.  One wonders how long it will be before this morality of action turns its steely gaze onto, say, the murdered in, I don't know, Darfur, or the inmates of a Sobibor (why didn't they just rush the guards? after all, the guards were outnumbered! the voice seems to say).  To the extent there is any irony to be found in surveying these comments, we can note that the one individual who is being praised even by those who evidently have little to say about the victims at Virginia Tech is Liviu Librescu, a 76-year old Holocaust survivor teaching at the college who gave his life blocking a door so as to delay Cho's entrance into the room, thereby allowing some of the students in the room time to escape; Zach Petkewicz, a student who did essentially the same thing as Librescu, but was not killed, is rarely mentioned - perhaps because his youth doesn't follow the trope that courage or defiance has been "mostly bred out of people".  On the macabre accounting evidently favoured by a Derbyshire, perhaps Librescu was simply correcting an earlier deficit in the "manliness" department.  I feel soiled even writing that, but it is the inevitable conclusion of the slightly deranged passing of judgment which we're encountering.

The philosophical worldview that underpins the comments of Derbyshire, Steyn et al. isn't a conservatism of responsibility, or solidarity, to say nothing of compassion.  It isn't, in other words, a conservatism I recognize or even understand.

Comments

[Kathy Shaidle]

Well, a conservativism that recognizes gay marriage, abortion and/or thinks winning elections is more important than principles isn't one I recognize either, but that seems to be what its come down to up here in Canada. Tomato, tomahto.

Anyhoo: do I think the Montreal Massacre guys were wimps because they didn't at least tell Lepine to go screw? Yep, pretty much. Have done since the day it happened. They outnumbered him 50 to one, and he wasn't "firing at them". He told them to leave and they left without a peep. And then grief counsellors told them "they were victims too" and that they'd done the right thing.

It is literally impossible for me to imagine such a thing happening in 1686 or 1786 or 1886. So why did it happen in 1986 or whenver that was? (As I wrote at the time, I was on the Left then and knew pacifist men who would have at least refused to leave out of "solidarity" or something. Or beat themselves up forever for not doing same...)

I don't pretend to have the answer. But I'm also not afraid to ask the question, because if we want to survive, somebody needs to.

I happen to think that "conservatism" has something to do with stuff like duty and believing there are worse things than dying. But I'm wacky that way. Too much Burke, methinks.

[Hey]

The point is that running or hiding under a desk is a futile act. If someone has a gun, you're likely dead anyways. So rush them.

If some jihadi captures you, surrendering is just going to get you a beheading video, not shipped to a POW camp. If you're "lucky" you'll be used as a bargaining chip to hurt your country like the British sailors.

My hatred is reserved for the ongoing socialisation that prefers passivity to courage, and is part and parcel of elevating feminity over masculinity. In a fully peaceful and civilised society, a feminine approach has virtues, but while we still live in an insecure world threatened by enemies who don't share our values and full of sociopaths in our own society we need to rediscover and promote the concepts of chivalry, honour, and courage.

As to what they could have done... he didn't have a magic gun. He had to reload, taking attention off of his targets and pointing the gun away. You can cover a lot of ground in 2 seconds (40-60 feet, easy) and even if you're hit you can still obstruct the shooter and hopefully disarm him before you bleed out.

We need to obliterate the idea that fleeing or hiding is the right move. With the threats we face, it is like the instinctual reaction of armadilloes to danger. Leaping high in the air is a good strategy for their natural predators but an absolutely horrible strategy for avoiding trucks. Hiding or running works with lions, tigers, and bears, but it doesn't work as well with psycos and jihadis. Seeing this and passing it along is not some horrible evil, but a hint of wisdom.

[Jim Treacher]

The thing I keep coming back to is that we don't even know for sure that none of them tried to fight back. Some of them could have died trying to stop him. He had guns, they didn't! Unlike all these other people, I'm not claiming to know exactly what happened at this point. But isn't it possible? Isn't it a bit early to tar and feather the damn corpses?

This maniac walked into a building full of people he knew were unarmed, locked them inside, and shot as many as he could until the police showed up and he shot himself. All because he thought life wasn't fair. But THEY'RE the cowards?

[Mike H]

I agree completely with Bob.

Cowardice is not how I would account for the reaction of a bunch of young adults, who, sitting through a boring chemistry lecture, were seconds later subjected to the unimaginable horror of seeing classmates mowed down in rapid succession.

Expecting people to make rational decisions (to "rush the gunman," for example) in situations like this excludes the well documented psychological effects from sudden, unexpected, overwhelmingly violent acts. The shock is so great that even gross motor skills are dramatically impaired, forget about the ability to think logically. There are exceptions among the population, but they're rare, except when considering soldiers or police officers, who specifically and repetitively train to overcome the effects of combat stress

Even so, it is not uncommon for trained police officers to lose the ability to function in a life or death combat shooting situation. Why should we expect more from university students?

[Chris Taylor]

I understand where you're coming from, Bob, and Derbyshire's reaction is over the top for me, too. That said I concur with Hey that a more forceful reaction is best. Fleeing merely ensures that the gunman has a greater chance of going about his mission unmolested. That is not a desirable outcome in terms of personal wellbeing or public safety.

Kateland (mother of the The Last Amazon) has a great post, ostensibly about boxing, but containing an incredible nugget of family history:

Years ago when their father and I were young, he was at a crowded nightclub when a man started to shoot-up the club. I should have been there that night but I begged off at the last minute because I was tired and I had a bad feeling about going out that night.

While all the patrons tried to run or find cover their father charged directly into the path of the gunman. He took two bullets in the chest, one in the leg and one in the arm before the gunman was within his reach. Then he broke the man’s jaw, collarbone, leg, and nose before he finally collapsed due to his own injuries.

At the hospital that night, I asked him why he didn’t run for cover like everyone else. He turned to me and explained patiently and without fanfare, “K-T, he could have hurt or killed someone. I knew he couldn’t kill me as long as I came in low and bobbed my head to side to side. Everyone was too afraid. His gun was just too small. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I hid and watch him hurt someone while I did nothing to stop it.” That’s when I knew I was dating a man, a real man, and I needed to not only take him seriously but accord him the respect due to a man.

Now I wouldn't expect every man to make that choice and head directly into harm's way. But in an environment as large as a university, some will. Some will die in the attempt. Treacher's correct in that we don't know how many made that fateful decision and did not live to tell the tale.

While I personally would hope to react to that situation as Kateland's husband did, I am not going to hold every other male up to that standard. That is where the gnashing of teeth is out of line. Not everyone has the presence of mind to react logically under extreme fright/stress.

Some people will be able to master their instinctive panic and react with clarity of thought. Others will go with their panic reaction until logic kicks in, then they might double back and try to make a difference. Still others will have the thought to intervene but lack the courage. Some will not have the thought at all, or at least not until they are well out of harm's way.

I would expect 99% of the people in that situation to flee, but that doesn't mean that societally, we ought to be encouraging the "save your own skin" approach. Lowering expectations merely ensures that people live down to them. There is something to be said for the shared expectation of a wee bit of bravery out of the lads. I stop short of Derb-style condemnation though.

[Richard Aubrey]

Anything better than the lowest conceivable standard will have some people not meeting it. And they will be shamed.
If that is not a purpose of a standard, it is one of the consequences.
Pressfield, asked about the Spartans he wrote of in Gates of Fire, said he didn't think you could teach courage but you could teach shame such that people were afraid not to be brave.
But there will always be somebody who fails.
Then what?

[The Self-Loathing Multiculturalist]

And if Kateland's husband had taken a shot in the head, or if one of the bullets had hit him in the heart, he'd be dead, and the moral of the story would be what, now?

On the psychological side, there were some studies done in the wake of the infamous Kitty Genovese murder in New York, which attempted to understand group thinking in violent situations. Based on the results, the researchers theorized that in group situations, responsibility becomes dissipated amongst the group, and people are less likely to act to save some one in distress.

Having said that, I've also had some personal acquaintances who were in law-enforcement and the military and even showed me a few defensive tactics when dealing with people with a gun. If you yourself are unarmed, you basically have two choices: (1) get close enough to the person so you can disable them or take away their gun. (2) If you are not close enough and the person is shooting, either get low or move away in a zig-zag pattern so it is harder to get shot.

Given that the guy seems to have barged into a crowded room which probably had at least 5-10 feet between himself and the closest person, options (1) and (2) were out. Regardless of how one feels about the idiotic statements made above, from a strictly tactical situation, I don't think anybody could have done much to stop the shooting, other than try to not make yourself a target, and help anyone that was.

The suggestion that those people were somehow not manly, or cowardly, is utterly disgusting. Perhaps, as another theory, in the split second when the shooting started, they made an accurate judgement of the situation and acted accordingly.

And as a side note, why is the men that had to be brave? I also knew people who were bouncers and the worst fights they ever had to break up were between women.

~The Self-Loathing Multiculturalist

[Kathy Shaidle]

Self loathing:

Well, he'd have been dead. We all have to die sometime. There are worse things than dying well.

Kitty Genovese: extremely bad example. See you get your information from TV movies and urban legends. Here is the truth about Genovese, whose murder was used by the NYTimes (surprise!) to advance a thesis about The Hopeless Existential Awfulness of Life Today(tm), in spite of the actual facts of the case:

http://www.oldkewgardens.com/kitty_genovese.html

All that, your last question and your blog handle tell me everything I need to know about the relative validity of your opinions and the verity of my own.

[Chris Taylor]

And if Kateland's husband had taken a shot in the head, or if one of the bullets had hit him in the heart, he'd be dead, and the moral of the story would be what, now?

Well clearly the moral is that unless it's an act you yourself would have taken, SLM, it was unmitigated stupidity. But I am not about to call her late husband stupid. I think he acted quite bravely and would hope to emulate his example.

Kate's husband could not have lived with his own guilt had he done nothing, so he had to attempting something. And as it turned out, he did stop the shooter.

If you're not comfortable making the attempt, fine. Fleeing is your choice. That is not a choice many people would be comfortable with. Trying to pass off the acts of the courageous as sheer luck and barely disguised stupidity might be okay in your playbook but definitely not mine. Nice job.

[The Self-Loathing Multiculturalist]

"Trying to pass off the acts of the courageous as sheer luck and barely disguised stupidity might be okay in your playbook but definitely not mine."

As a matter of fact, it is luck that he wasn't killed. And yes, I do consider it stupid to charge into some crazy person shooting wildly for no reason. You said that he was in a bar. He could have thrown a beer or liquor bottle at the shooter. He could have spit a drink in his eyes. If it was a sports bar, he could have thrown billiard balls or used a pool cue. There are plenty of options that can be used to even the odds somewhat. The people who barricaded the door at VTech were making a perfectly rational tactical judgement, as it was the best option to save their lives. If they had done the "brave" thing and charged into the shooter, they would've been dead and accomplished nothing.

And dearest Kathy, may I refer you to the following:

http://www.pineforge.com/newman4study/resources/latane1.htm

I am familiar with the facts of the Genovese case. I was referencing the experiment that followed in the aftermath, not the case itself.

[Chris Taylor]

Okay I give. Tell me, how much beer do you have to spit, and at what effective range, to disable a shooter and prevent further casualties?

[Damian]

The one to blame in all this is the killer. The victims weren't responsible for his pathology.

Having said that, while you can't choose which horrible circumstances get penned into your schedule by God or Fate or Whatever, you can choose how you deal with them. I was accused of blaming the victims after Katrina when I noted that a bit more emphasis on personal responsibility might have alleviated some of the suffering there. I will probably be accused of the same thing for wishing that more of the victims - and again, they were victims - had reacted more forcefully to their victimization.

I suspect any phrase that ends "...or die trying" doesn't carry as much weight in today's society as it did in previous generations, and that disappoints me.

[The Self-Loathing Multiculturalist]

"Okay I give. Tell me, how much beer do you have to spit, and at what effective range, to disable a shooter and prevent further casualties?"

Here's a scenario, spit something, or throw something, anything, in the persons face, and THEN charge them. Personally, that makes more sense than charging heroically to prove my manhood.

As for how much and at what range, I guess that depends on your size, spitting/throwing abilities, etc.

[Chris Taylor]

The point of tackling a shooter isn't to prove your manhood. The point is to neutralise the shooter's ability to shoot -- as rapidly as possible.

Taking precious seconds and exposing yourself so that you can *maybe* interfere with his/her targeting will have the effect of making you the primary target if the attempt fails. Which still leaves you tens of feet away, not in cover or concealment, and not in any position to deal with the shooter.

We can debate the semantics of whose magic missile is more effective all day. I happen to think it's wise to use those seconds to get up close and personal so that you have a more rapid chance of interdiction. Plus, in Kateland's "case study", it worked. Maybe you could provide a similar case study where a shooter was disabled through judicious use of billiard balls or spit -- while also not unnecessarily risking his/her life.

Fact is the whole enterprise reeks of risk. Some people are willing to hazard their lives for yours. You aren't willing to reciprocate unless it's in a meticulous non-risky way. I get it, SLM. Want a cookie? I'd rather celebrate the guys who hazard themselves so that others may live.

[Mike H]

I agree we should "celebrate the guys who hazard themselves so that others may live," but we should do so without criticizing those who don't.

Given the circumstances, it's the last thing we should be engaging in.

[Jim Treacher]

"The point of tackling a shooter isn't to prove your manhood. The point is to neutralise the shooter's ability to shoot -- as rapidly as possible."

And if they'd had laser guns, they could have melted his face off. How is it so many people are suddenly experts on how this guy should have been stopped? Have you dug up blueprints of the building, figured out sightlines and distances, all that stuff? Gone through the dossiers on the victims and figured out which ones would have been the fittest candidates to mount an unarmed counterattack? It's been a whole 3 days, after all, so why wait until all the bodies are in the ground to start offering them some constructive criticism.

[Chris Taylor]

I have no interest in second-guessing the deceased, only in second-guessing SLM's assertion that there's something mentally deficient with those unwilling to bolt for the exits. You can read whatever criticism you want of VT in there on your own, but it doesn't exist.

My interest is in defending the honour of Kate's husband's actions. Period.

[Richard Aubrey]

Kate's husband's action reminds me of one of Kipling's pieces in his Epitaphs of The War.

The Refined Man.

I turned aside for my needs.
I was seen from afar and killed.
How is this reason for mirth?
I paid the price to live with myself
On the terms that I willed.

The gentleman could not have lived with himself if he hadn't tried. So he was willing to pay the price on the terms that he willed, which is to say, who he was.
Fortunately for him and a number of people, he was both lucky and competent.

[One more opinion]

Here's a thought ... maybe in preparation for the next time this could happen, all universities should equipt classrooms with computers, access to the internet etc. and the students could go online during the event to garner the opinions of those who aren't present, will likely never be in such a situation, yet still have the amazing ability to sit back and judge. I mean c'mon - are you people serious? Very valid point that you have no idea how many of the victims tried to fight back. Other valid point that they were caught completely off-guard! It's not like they had warning - how much combat training did they have? If someone was directly trying to injure/kill a loved one, I am sure an instinct would kick in that would make it more likely for someone to attack; but otherwise, I am sure the intial reaction would be more a state of shock at the unexpected, unplanned, unbelievable event. How long did the attack go on for? How many people in the building even knew what was going on? When the police arrived did they just rush right into the building, or did they try to sit back, take stock of what was happening, and use some common sense before rushing blind? To blame any of the victims in this (or any!) crime and devalue thier lives / actions by essentially calling them cowards really is an act of cowardice in itself as they have no ability to retaliate. I don't mean we shouldn't try to analyze and learn from situations, but you should have the decency to at least try to preserve the dignity of those who died. Shame on all of you who put your opinions above the dignity of the victims. I hope that if you, or a loved one, is ever in this situation the world will be kinder to you and yours.