Thoughts on Passivity on Patriots Day

Bravery is a virtue; helplessness is not.     

Long ago, way before 9/11, when airline hijackings were the craze, I thought then and still do that every citizen is a foot soldier in the fight against terror.  Most days, I drive through Lexington Center and see the statue of the Minuteman, an ordinary man,  ready in a minute to defend home and others.

Still none of us know what we would do if faced with a mad killer with a gun. 

Kathy Shadie says
Remember: when we say "we don't know what we'd do under the same circumstances", we make cowardice the default position. At least show a smidgen of bravery and say "I", rather than "we."

I don't know what I would do if faced with a mad killer with a gun. 

I like to think that I would be brave, push past my fear, not run away, save lives.  You see as a young girl, I grew up on the stories of martyrs, often young girls just like me.  When I wasn't playing cowboys and Indians with my best friend Kathy, we played martyr, practicing how to fight back and die well  if the Russian Communists ever took over the country.  How many children play like that any more? 

From Meditation on Death of the Young
The quarterback of the football team was just outside the hall when the shooting began. He said, in an article in the Washington Post, that he
"I couldn't tell whether people were hurt or not, "I was kind of on the move. The whole time, I wasn't really trying to figure what was happening or where the shots were coming from. I was just kind of on the move,

No one made a move to attack the killer or throw something at him.  No one. 

Did it all happen too fast?

What if they had been warned that a double murder had occurred and a killer was loose on the campus?

Jack Dunphy who's been present at over 1000 shooting scenes in his police career writes
This would have given them the chance to make an informed decision on how best to proceed with the day.  After all, the difference between what happened on Flight 93 and on the other doomed flights of 9/11 was that the passengers on Flight 93 had been warned of what awaited them.  Had students and faculty at Virginia Tech been told that a murderer may be stalking the campus, some of them might have been alert to the danger and steeled themselves to fend off the killer.

Nathanael Blake asks Where Were the Men?
College classrooms have scads of young men who are at their physical peak, and none of them seems to have done anything beyond ducking, running, and holding doors shut. Meanwhile, an old man hurled his body at the shooter to save others.

Something is clearly wrong with the men in our culture. Among the first rules of manliness are fighting bad guys and protecting others: in a word, courage. And not a one of the healthy young fellows in the classrooms seems to have done that.

Dr. Sanity says Feminishness is a Word Whose Time Has Come for  a society with too much yin and not enough yang and quotes John Derbyshire, "PC is fem and its consequences are femmer..."

Mark Steyn writes A Culture of Passivity is an existential threat to our society
They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet....it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

Have we become too passive, too afraid, too nice?  Is even the talk of self defense politically incorrect?  Where is it decreed we always have to wait for the police or the firemen when lives are in danger?

Michelle Malkin says
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.

The Anchoress  discusses with her son the various ways a random shooter could be taken down in "Throw a desk, a heavy book, make him flinch."

While Varifrank has the best guidelines of all in More Sparta, Less Athens.