Below is the transcript for my current Shire Network News segment. I don’t think it will be my last thought on this issue.
This is Meryl Yourish, and this is On Second Thought, for Shire Network News.
This segment is dedicated to all you tough guys out there. I’ve been reading your comments and blog posts and letters about how if you’d been at Virginia Tech, you’d have taken out the shooter. You wouldn’t have cowered down and waited to be murdered. Nuh-uh. You’d have leaped up and, wading through a hail of hollow-point bullets fired at point-blank range, disarmed the madman, saving all your fellow students and becoming the hero of millions.
NBC’s Today show even found an expert to tell America that we have to teach our students to be tougher during attacks by crazed, insane gunmen. He said we need to teach them not to cower down behind their desks and wait to be killed. What a tough guy, huh? If only he’d been there, I’ll bet he’d have managed to stop Cho.
All you tough guys, I salute you. I think you’re right.
You know, if only I’d been there, things would have been different, too. Using my powers of 20-20 hindsight as foresight, and adding a plus-ten shield of invulnerability, I’d have lain in wait for Cho Seung-Hui, and grabbed his guns and then knocked him out and waited for the cops to show. It would have been just like it is in the movies. One punch to the jaw, and down goes the bad guy.
But why stop there? If only I’d been at the Texas School Book Depository in 1963, I could have stopped Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating President Kennedy. Just think how different the world would have been: At the very least, we probably never would have had Jimmy Carter as president.
Wait, I have an even better idea! If I’d been around in Sarajevo in 1914, I would have used my amazing hindsight powers and the ability to predict the future, and stopped the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, thereby also preventing World War I. By preventing World War I, I’d have prevented World War II, and all of the horrors caused by the Nazis. I’d have saved tens of millions of people. No, hundreds of millions, counting their descendants.
Wow. That’s pretty amazing. If only, huh?
However, back in the reality-based community, it turns out that there wasn’t much at all those poor children could do. In an interview I saw, one of the victims said that Cho came in and “bang bang bang bang bang,†he just shot everyone in the class. He went on to describe that it all happened quickly—Cho walked in the room, shot up the class, and left. Then he came back later and shot the students as they lay on the floor, making sure they were dead.
The killer used hollow-point bullets. He used them because he didn’t intend to leave anyone alive. And he went back to the rooms where he’d been, firing more bullets into the bodies of the students he’d already shot. Perhaps one of the tough guys out there could explain to me how he would have handled the pain of a wound caused by a hollow-point bullet as he then fought to wrestle Cho to the ground, or take away his guns. Or perhaps one of the tough guys—maybe even the so-called expert that the Today Show brought in—could tell me how you prepare a course in self-defense from crazed killers who may or may not be lying in wait for you on a Monday morning at a pastoral Virginia college campus.
Instead of all that nonsense, let’s focus on a real hero of the Virginia Tech shooting: Professor Livui Librescu, a 77-year-old Holocaust survivor who spent his last breath blocking the door, trying to stop Cho from coming into his classroom. Librescu’s efforts saved the lives of most of his students, at the cost of his own. He was buried in Israel on Friday. His oldest son’s words could stand as Librescu’s eulogy:
“I walked through the streets today with my head held high because I have such a father.”
He wasn’t a tough guy. He was just a hero.
You cannot outrun a bullet, and once the shooter makes his intention plain, there is no survival advantage in not attacking. For years they told women not to fight back, but now they agree that fightig back increases your chances of survival. The guy fired from 100 to 300 shots depending who you listen to, surely there was an interval to throw laptops, booka, inkwells and freshmen at him. You get no points for submitting gracefully to slaughter. Hey, he is going to kill you anyway, so why worry about getting him mad at you?
Good luck with that, Walter.
And do we really know yet that nobody did that? If you throw a laptop at him and miss and he kills you because he has a gun and you don’t, you can’t really tell your story.
It’s easy afterwards to think of what people should have done and argue for why fighting back is the right answer. The hard part is actually doing it, when your body’s reaction is “no…. please don’t hurt me!”
That is why self defense classes are good for everyone. It does not pay to try to figure out what to do or try to act like in a movie. However, if someone is trained properly he (or she) will react automatically and correctly.
That is why an attempted mass murderer in Texas was stopped by an off duty policeman and another student who had their weapons available and had been trained in how to use them.
Walter: Some of them did fight back.
And died.
Some of them defended themselves and lived.
They didn’t seem to have any other options.
Meryl, as much as I appreciate seeing yet another column deriding the “Tough Guys” of the internet for calling the college students “cowards” (I’ve dropped a few friends over this and don’t regret doing so, though it hurts), I disagree with your calling them “children.” They were adults. Old enough to drive, old enough to work for pay, old enough to serve in the military. It’s perfectly possible to stand up for the murdered without contributing to the current disturbing and destructive trend of infantilizing young American adults.
If only we had patrols of Internet tough guys on campuses, they could stop any attack before it started. This might lead to calls for chair and laptop control laws, though. It would be comical, if the lashing out of nitwits like Derbyshire (http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzllOTU0MDUzY2NhZDE2YmViYmRiNmE5ZjM1OWQxYTU=)
wasn’t so vile in attacking murder victims.
We can agree to disagree. I have rarely found college students to be particularly adult in their lives and actions, and now more than ever, as I approach my middle years, I find their actions childish and childlike.
I agree that many of our parents are not pushing our children to accept enough responsibility in their lives. The bulk of those parents happen to be in the middle and upper classes.
I’ve never seen a working-class eighteen-year-old that I wouldn’t call a responsible adult. They generally don’t have the luxury of remaining a child through their mid-twenties.
Fair enough.
Shoulda’, woulda’, coulda’.
If you are going to die, die trying, not whimpering.
Apparently, Walter, that goes for your argument as well.
So, we now know that some think defending by attacking is nuts. OK, maybe that’s so, but I would like to hear from Yourish, Treacher et al., what should be done.
I too suspect the tough talking guys would get all poopy pantied and hide or run, or be uselessly killed. I also think hiding or running is despicable.
What to do?
I’d like to think I would do something better than skulking. Is ‘Death before Dishonor’ still around. If we lose the ideal does the reality degenerate?
The tough talkers are right about one thing – a swarm would have taken him down. Machine guns, even bunkered ones, have been successfully assaulted by infantry.
“I would like to hear from Yourish, Treacher et al., what should be done.”
What they did do. Stay alive any way they could. The only despicable thing is second-guessing them for it.