The Va Tech tragedy has really caused me to be a bit more introspective today. Our partisan political climate, of which I am definitely a part, exceeds even the vulgarity of the media, and as was noted on other blogs the bodies hadn’t yet cooled when gun control activists began fundraising and lobbying. Gun rights activists have responded in kind, but the fact is that there is no gun law that would have prevented this tragedy. If there were no such thing as guns, and Cho used a sword the same amount of people likely would have died because nobody would have stopped him.
The sheer unseemliness of making a political statement, rather than honoring the dead, kept me from writing this post earlier, but something needs to be said and that is the responsibility for adults, for that is what a college student is whether we like to admit it or not, not dying in the dozens like sheep with only an elderly holocaust survivor acting to save any of his fellows rests squarely on the shoulders of our increasingly effiminizing society.
We teach kids to embrace Gandhi’s non-violence (never mentioning his convictions that Jews should have allowed themselves to die in the Holocaust without fighting) as courageous, and are shocked when a group of “good” kids watches a rape or a mugging and does nothing. We teach people that it is the government, not themselves, who are responsible for their personal safety and wonder why so many people just stand there wide eyed when someone attacks their loved ones.
We tell kids throughout their formative years that there is nothing worth dying for, when in fact most of your fellow Americans, and your fellow humans are worth dying for. If you see a man about to massacre a classroom full of students it’s absolutely worth the risk to your well-being to try your best to stop it.
A couple of years ago, I had just busted my toe and was laying in bed one night miserable when I heard blood curdling screams. Until I heard those screams I actually didn’t know what “blood curdling” meant, but these screams drove me out of bed. I hurriedly got dressed, limped outside and there in front of a bar around the corner from my house were four guys beating up two women. I called the cops, of course.
I yelled to the four, “The cops are coming,” and guess what happened? Nothing. They kept beating the two women. I yelled it again, still nothing. It wasn’t until I started to walk toward them, to intervene, that they stopped. One big guy stumbled over, fairly drunk and threatened me but I stood my ground. I was scared and even sans bad toe, I couldn’t take these guys, but neither could the two women. And in true Bronx fashion, it was 10-12 min later that the cops showed up. Had I not looked like I’d fight these guys, there was more than enough time for one of those women to have been killed.
The point isn’t that I’m a brave guy because I’m not. I’m selfish enough to admit my survival comes first in most situations. But not this one. I know it wasn’t the same as having a gun pulled on you, but of course I’ve had that happen too. I’m from East Orange, NJ and I’ve had guns pulled on me three times and been shot at once. Each time I survived by knowing what to do, and just looking a guy in the eye and hoping he doesn’t shoot you isn’t it.
My point is, my family taught me how to survive, how to protect myself. Somewhere along the line I learned that there are times when you’ve got to protect others. But nowadays a lot of people don’t know how or when to do either of those things, and that is essentially why this tragedy ended up so tragic. That’s why an 80-something year old man died a hero, and the shooter died the worst spree killer in history. And why dozens of young men dove out windows, leaving their fellow students to their fate, rather than helping them.
That’s a long introduction to this piece Mark Steyn wrote about the same thing, but he’s more eloquent than I am on the subject. It’s short so read the whole thing, but if you’re in a rush here’s the important part:
We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdom’s security blanket. Geraldo-like “protection†is a delusion: when something goes awry — whether on a September morning flight out of Logan or on a peaceful college campus — the state won’t be there to protect you. You’ll be the fellow on the scene who has to make the decision. As my distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle says:
When we say “we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstancesâ€, we make cowardice the default position.
I’d prefer to say that the default position is a terrible enervating passivity. Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.
The Kathy Shaidle mentioned has more thoughts on the heroic Israeli Liviu Librescu, and the lack of other heroes here. Human Events is asking the hard questions. I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that however the gun control debate plays out, we have to start teaching kids early that they are their own last line of defense.
