This post was marginal to begin with, but now I am confident it has no bearing on the Virginia Tech matter. I leave it up only because I think the issues are important. They just don’t have relevance to the event.
OK, I’ve not said much about Virginia Tech. There is a reason. For the last few days I have wanted to say something that might judge other people who have been in insane circumstances that I have never endured. I don’t know what happened. I pray God that I am never in those circumstances. It may be that my worries are completely baseless in this case.
But the question has been haunting me. Even though I may some day prove to be nothing but a huge hypocrite, I have to ask it.
How does one man with two handguns get to kill whom he pleases and then choose his own time and manner of death?
I know that I am talking about something I know nothing about. Then again, I’m raising boys (sexist comment, I know. I’m unrepentant, though I’d be happy if my daughters take out a psychopath creep some day; but this is about being unarmed, so I’m stressing the male sex). I want to raise boys who take action when necessary and are willing to risk their lives for others. And, with that in mind, it is pretty much impossible not to aske the question.
I would never have articulated it if I hadn’t seen Mark Steyn’s piece.
The cost of a “protected” society of eternal “children” is too high. Every December 6th, my own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the “Montreal massacre,” the 14 female students of the Ecole Polytechnique murdered by Marc Lepine (born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you’d never know that from the press coverage). As I wrote up north a few years ago:
Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.
I have always believed America is different. Certainly on September 11th we understood. The only good news of the day came from the passengers who didn’t meekly follow the obsolescent 1970s hijack procedures but who used their wits and acted as free-born individuals. And a few months later as Richard Reid bent down and tried to light his shoe in that critical split-second even the French guys leapt up and pounded the bejasus out of him.
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 circumstances”, 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.
Now that I’ve thought about it more, maybe I can put it this way, as much as I don’t want to sound arrogant or boastful about deeds I have never attempted and facing fears I have never encountered, even more I don’t want to prepare myself and anyone I might influence for passivity and perhaps even cowardice. OK?
Of course, I’m speaking of the courage to rush an armed man while unarmed. I’d prefer a society where we were permitted tools that allowed us to get by with a little less courage. Rick Capezza led me to this article:
Nearly a decade ago, a Springfield, Oregon, high schooler, a hunter familiar with firearms, was able to bring an unfolding rampage to an abrupt end when he identified a gunman attempting to reload his .22-caliber rifle, made the tactical decision to make a move and tackled the shooter.
A few years back, an assistant principal at Pearl High School in Mississippi, which was a gun-free zone, retrieved his legally owned Colt .45 from his car and stopped a Columbine wannabe from continuing his massacre at another school after he had killed two and wounded more at Pearl.
At an eighth-grade school dance in Pennsylvania, a boy fatally shot a teacher and wounded two students before the owner of the dance hall brought the killing to a halt with his own gun.
More recently, just a few miles up the road from Virginia Tech, two law school students ran to fetch their legally owned firearm to stop a madman from slaughtering anybody and everybody he pleased. These brave, average, armed citizens neutralized him pronto.
My hero, Dr. Suzanne Gratia Hupp, was not allowed by Texas law to carry her handgun into Luby’s Cafeteria that fateful day in 1991, when due to bureaucrat-forced unarmed helplessness she could do nothing to stop satanic George Hennard from killing 23 people and wounding more than 20 others before he shot himself. Hupp was unarmed for no other reason than denial-ridden “feel good” politics.
She has since led the charge for concealed weapon upgrade in Texas, where we can now stop evil. Yet, there are still the mindless puppets of the Brady Campaign and other anti-gun organizations insisting on continuing the gun-free zone insanity by which innocents are forced into unarmed helplessness. Shame on them. Shame on America. Shame on the anti-gunners all.
Do I love everything about that article. Obviously not. These are the opinions of Ted Nugent, after all. Why couldn’t Ronnie James Dio or Bruce Dickinson have penned them?
But getting back to courage, we need it. We need to honor it. If my sons were drafted into some overseas war and were killed, I know how I would feel about that human sacrifice. If they laid down their lives for friends, I would be proud of them. It seems like everything in our culture is bent on discouraging such values.
