If you go to the New York Times Flash presentation of the Tech timeline, a couple of things leap out at you right away. Go to image 6. You’ll see that Rooms 204 (image 15) and 205 (image 14) had the highest survival rate. Everyone in Room 205 survived. Here’s why:
The small group of 10 in Haiyan Cheng’s computer class heard the loud banging outside. She thought it was construction noise at first, but it distracted her. No, they were pops. Then silence, then more pops. Cheng and a female student went to the door and peered out. They saw a man emerge from a room across the hall. He was holding a gun, but it was pointed down. They quickly shut the door. More popping sounds, getting louder, closer. The class was in a panic. One student, Zach Petkowicz, was near the lectern “cowering behind it,” he would later say, when he realized that the door was vulnerable. There was a heavy rectangular table in the class, and he and two other students pushed it against the door. No sooner had they fixed it in place than someone pushed hard from the outside. It was the gunman. He forced it open about six inches, but no farther. Petkowicz and his classmates pushed back, not letting up. The gunman fired two shots through the door. One hit the lectern and sent wood scraps and metal flying. Neither hit any of the students. They could hear a clip dropping, the distinct, awful sound of reloading. And, again, the gunman moved on.
Room 204 was Liviu Librescu’s class, where he blockaded the door as long as he could, giving his students a chance to escape.
The other factor that made a difference in the survival of the students: Rooms 204 and 205 were the last ones that Cho got to. By the time he tried to get into the rooms, the teachers and students had figured out that something horrible was going on, and barricaded their doors. That’s also how the wounded survived in Room 207—after Cho left, they blocked the door with a table.
The Tough Guys who think the students should have fought back and disarmed Cho don’t seem to have twigged to the fact that many of the students did what they could to fight and survive—without facing a man carrying two semiautomatic weapons loaded with hollow-point bullets. The ones that did face Cho did what I’d probably have done: Dove for cover while he was shooting at them.
And one more thing: How many of you readers have ever heard live gunfire, in person? Do you know what semiautomatic gunfire sounds like? Do you know why people say it sounds like firecrackers? Because it does. That’s a fact that, unfortunately, I’ve come to know in person due to my neighborhood having gone downhill these last few years.
I heard shots fired in my neighborhood again last night. It’s gotten so I stop to listen, count the number of shots, and then call the police and tell them how many shots and where I think they came from. When the shots come out like this: “powpowpowpowpow”—I know someone’s got a semiauto in the neighborhood and is having a little fun with it.
If I’d been in one of those Tech classrooms, I’d have known that someone was firing a gun down the hall—because I know now what gunfire sounds like. But when I was in college, I most emphatically did not know the sound of a gun being fired, except for the ones I heard on TV.
Most of those kids didn’t know what hit them. Especially the ones in the first class he entered.
The attacks were over in ten minutes. I fail to see what more the students could have done.
It’s funny, I was going to blog on the same “tough guy” theme about how it seems that 30 people should be able to overcome one guy with a gun. I came to your blog because I knew I could find the name of the prof (Professor Livui Librescu) that gave his life and died as a real tough guy and hero. After reading your two posts and the news article detailing what happened, I had to change my tune a bit.
Easier said than done after reading how fast everything unfolded. Not much time to think or react at all. I think team work and group survival needs to present and in the forefront of your mind BEFORE something like this happens, so it intuition and not a thought process.
As alway, Merly, you ROCK!
Sorry about the name misspelling, Meryl. I’m a little dyslexic at times when the fingers tend to go a little too fast.
I do not criticize, I only suggest the best survival tactic. Never submit.
Er… I am not a tough guy, but I did hear a few shots in my life.
Meryl – you are right, it takes guts to rush a guy with two pistols, and several folks would have died in the attempt.
But not 32.
Snoopy, if there had been an opportunity to rush him, I’d agree with you. I don’t think there was really much of an opportunity.
Did you read the WaPo link? It has the best blow-by-blow of what happened. I don’t think those kids had a chance. I think it happened too suddenly, and too horribly, for them to react any other way than they did.
Imagine being in a class on a Monday morning, and seeing another student walk in the classroom door. Then he starts shooting. In ten seconds, five kids are lying on the ground bleeding.
Now tell me how the rest of the class was supposed to jump up, say, “Hey, guys, let’s rush him! It’s only one shooter!”
In your view, is it possible for one to suggest that there might have been a better result if somebody had done something different in that horrible situation without bragging that one would have acted heroically in that situation?
Yes. But the thing is, it’s such a totally subjective thing. Nobody really knows how they’d react to that kind of situation until they’re in it.
One boy overcame his fear and helped save his entire class by the simple act of pushing a table across the door. Others never did, and died, with most of their classmates.
I can’t judge those students who were too afraid to think of anything other than hiding. I can wish they’d done otherwise, but I can also wish I’d win the lottery, with equal amounts of success.
I think that’s what’s bothering me the most: The ones who are judging the victims for not fighting harder. (Not saying that anyone here is doing that, just that is the reason I’m getting so aggravated about other bloggers.)
Bruce Tognazzini published an excellent article on how people respond in panic situations. Those who criticize the students for not somehow managing to stay calm when under fire should read it. If there was an “if only” it needn’t to happen long before the shooting.
Good. Because I want to suggest — without arguing that I would or wouldn’t freeze up the next time I run into somebody threatening me or my family — that it’s worth thinking about, in advance, what the least bad thing to do is, and what other things, in advance, one should do to avoid or handle unlikely (and, thankfully, we’re all unlikely to have to deal with a murderous psychopath) horrible events.
“In your view, is it possible for one to suggest that there might have been a better result if somebody had done something different in that horrible situation without bragging that one would have acted heroically in that situation?”
Sure. There might have been a better result if that freak had started off by putting the barrel of his gun against the roof of his mouth and pulling the trigger.
Having read your stuff for years, I’d have expected better of you, Mr. Treacher, and, all in all, I still do.
Joel, I think right now you and Jim are talking past one another.
Jim, I don’t think Joel is on the “They should have fought harder” bandwagon. He’s just asking us to think about ways we might be able to prepare people for things like this in the future.
Mind you, I think there’s simply no realistic way to prepare for it, and I don’t see colleges offering “Columbine Prevention 101” courses, but I don’t think that’s what Joel is getting at, either.
Let’s lower things a notch, please.
Well, except I wish that Cho had done that, too. But he was fucking nuts on top of everything else. Apparently, not nuts enough to kill just himself, though.
Every situation is, by its nature, different; if anybody wants to point out the great differences in http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/04/24/cops_usc_students_hold_off_gunman/?rss_id=Bosto with what happened at VTech, that’s fine with me.
But . . . is it at least worth considering the possibility that in this or another potentially horrible situation folks having thought about it in advance led them to make what turned out to have been and might in principle have also been a good series of decisions?
In response to your last, Meryl, I do think that responsible adults should think about — and discuss with both kids and other responsible adults — what to do in all sorts of unlikely circumstances. Nobody has ever tried to force either of my kids into a car, for example — but it is something that we’ve discussed, most recently after one of my carry permit students shared that his college-age daughter and a friend had been the subjects of an attempted abduction… his daughter fought back, and was left seriously beaten up on the sidewalk; her friend complied, and was hurt rather more seriously over an extended period of time.
“And one more thing: How many of you readers have ever heard live gunfire, in person? Do you know what semiautomatic gunfire sounds like? Do you know why people say it sounds like firecrackers? Because it does.”
I have and so have all hunters and gun owners.
Semiautomatic fire is not distinguishable by sound from revolver fire.
I don’t really understand your comment about gunshots sounding like firecrackers. They do a bit at some distances, but I do not think most gun owners would be fooled for long. Do you say this with reference to a string of firecrackers and the rapidity of the ‘bangs’? If so, and if I couple that with your question about recognizing semiautomatic fire, I question whether you are confusing automatic and semiautomatic.
Semi-auto fire is not necessarily rapid. When I shoot my semi-autos I usually shoot quite slowly.
I have been shooting handguns for 44 years. I am right handed and a ‘good’ shot. It would be very difficult for me to repeatedly or rapidly shoot accurately beyond 50-75 feet. Handguns are inherently inaccurate and semi-autos even more so. I could not shoot accurately at all with my left hand. If I tried to shoot with both left and right hands at the same time I would likely lose even more accuracy in my right handed shooting. Shooting at a moving target is at least an order of magnitude more difficult.
People think that with repeated or multiple fire, as in machine guns or shotguns, there is bound to be a hit. It just is not so. Consider the many game birds that fly through a cloud of shot. Consider the ratio of ammunition expenditure to hits in war. 100 to 1? 1000 to 1? Consider the mathematics of the thing. A handgun shot is a tube of less than 100 feet about 9mm in diameter that exists for less than 1/10 of a second. Do not believe your TV. Shooting someone from a distance is a very chancy thing.
If someone were shouting at me, running at me and throwing things at me I would be hopelessly inaccurate, particularly if I were to try shooting with both hands, from the hip, Hollywood style.
Had a sufficiently large group of people been able to coordinate to swarm Cho, while yelling and throwing things, they would have succeeded. Even more so had they been armed, or had good throwing objects.
I think the following are reasonable questions:
1. Should schoolrooms have arms in them at all or should all use of force be abjured.
2. If yes, should the arms be deadly, or should some lower intensity armaments be made permanently available. Everything from bows and arrows through steel ball slingshots down to a stack of baseballs could be a weapon.
3. Should schoolrooms have defensive items in them? Body armor, vests, shields, flash-bangs, tear gas?
4. Should students be taught how and when to coordinate defensive attack and tested periodically with drills.
I’m not sure I like the idea of a firearm in a schoolroom. I see no harm in a stack of elastic powered hunting slingshots and a jar of 1 inch steel balls or some throwable objects. Even baseballs.
I seriously object to my children being completely defenseless. We know the state will not and can not defend us very well as it is a great, gross, blundering, blunt instrument.
It may be right to say the VT students acted correctly in their circumstances, but it is not enough. We must consider those ‘circumstances’ very carefully.
I’ve heard both semiautomatic gunfire and firecrackers, and have demonstrably — on at least one occasion — gotten it wrong as to which one it was, when, last fall, what I thought were three fast shots happened outside my house. (I called 911 and took other obvious precautions before there was a flurrying of similar sounds that were clearly too closely spaced to be gunfire, looked outside, and called 911 back to tell them “never mind.” )
As to firearms in a college classroom, I was at a debate — on, interestingly enough, whether students at the U of M should be prevented from carrying firearms for their own protection while at the U — at a college classroom the U of M, last year. I know that at least fifteen of the people attending the debate were (lawfully) carrying, and I know that the head debater from the antigun group knew that there were folks carrying, too*; it didn’t stop her from interrupting her debating opponent and behaving with other mild rudeness, and, unsurprisingly, the only thing that was shot her way or threatened to be shot her way were some irritated glances. (She obviously wasn’t worried about the prospect for gunfire; she brought her young child with her.)
_________
* One of the antigun folks had attempted to get the U police to interfere with that; the U police were conspicuous by their absence, presumably doing something rather more useful.
“Having read your stuff for years, I’d have expected better of you, Mr. Treacher, and, all in all, I still do.”
Better than wishing that guy had killed just himself instead of all those people?
Treacher, don’t be snippy, were all on the same side here.
I tend to get snippy when people condescend to me.
The time is long past when all of us should have learned that we need to be ready to defend and protect ourselves and each other. I live in earthquake country so this mindset has long extend beyond evil-doers to the threat of natural disasters.