Of all the arrogant ignorance displayed in the past couple of days regarding the Blacksburg Massacre, nothing trumps what John Derbyshire and Nathaniel Blake had to say Tuesday about the alleged passivity and cowardice of students at Virginia Tech. As numerous commenters pointed out, it's easy to pin medals on yourself from the comfort of your parents' basement. Today, we've got more of the same from Mark Steyn at NRO.
While many of us think we would react calmly and bravely in a dire emergency - and it is worth the exercise of preparing oneself psychologically and physically for such circumstances - none of us knows for sure how we would behave until we actually come face-to-face with peril. Would we rush to pry some stranger or some stranger's children from a burning car as the flames sped toward the fuel tank? Would we take on the bully pounding the class nerd behind the school? Would we join the passengers of the hijacked plane and crash the cockpit door? Easy to type "of course" on the keyboard. Easy to be a hero when there's time to ponder it over a martini. Easy to mock people who don't measure up to your never-tested standards. Talk is cheap, and brave talk is cheapest of all.
What we now know is that some of those who faced the gunman at Virginia Tech did selflessly risk their lives to save others.
As reported in the The New York Times (and noted in jhritz's Diary), one of those was Engineering Professor Liviu Librescu, an Israeli Holocaust survivor, who blocked Cho Seung-Hui from entering the room, urging students to escape. Many did. He was murdered on the spot.
Read more: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/4/1...
In additional to the armchair cowboy's such as Derbyshire, Blake and Steyn the usual suspects from Fux News have also jumped into the fray.
Michelle Malkin: “Enough is enough, indeed. Enough of intellectual disarmament. Enough of physical disarmament. You want a safer campus? It begins with renewing a culture of self-defense — mind, spirit and body. It begins with two words: Fight back.“
Living in the same delusional fantasy world where America still has a chance to be greated with flowers and candy in Iraq are Fox's John Gibson and Joe Napolitano who imagine that what this situation really needed was an appearance by Wyatt Earp for an old-style western shoot-out:
GIBSON: So, theoretically, in this lecture hall where all 31 were killed, there could have been someone with a carry permit carrying their gun to shoot the shooter?
NAPOLITANO: No, because the same people that just dropped the ball, as Bo just described, that allowed 32 additional people to die, also said: “Virginia lets you carry a gun at a gas station or a bank or a stadium, but not on a college campus, where you may protect kids.”
Before we turn a school campus into the "O.K. Corral" perhaps we should think about not letting people who've been diagnosed as suicidal and prescribed anti-depressants have accesss to firearms in the first place.
Vyan
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