I have sent you a link you should like, Donnah !!

Thank you for not thinking those people were in any way responsible for what was done to them. We are exceedingly rare, apparently.

Praise those who are capable of moments of great heroism, but don't bag on people who are just mere mortals suddenly in a world of shit.

Dr. Laura is spouting off now as well, btw. According to her, a couple of years of compulsory military service would have made them all Audie Murphys. Only, it doesn't work that way.

The "they should have done this" or "I would have done that" crowd do have some valid points - a "gun free" zone isn't always gun free and our society does teach us to react passively. Still, some are over the top. I don't see most of this as blaming the victims, I think it's an expression of a wish that things had been different and a hope that if we were in a similar situation that it would be different.

We must be reading different comments, Marybeth. Tell me which of those dead reacted passively. I'd really like to hear how these students screwed up in the face of a sudden onslaught, and how anyone from the safety of their computer room and fervid imagination would have acted differently. I'm not seeing how they failed and I damn sure don't put any stock in anyone sitting at home second-guessing them. Those students in the first classes he went to didn't react passively -- they didn't have any time to react at all.

BTW, I spent five years in the military and went to war. If the door to this room is suddenly opened and someone sprays the room with gunfire, I have no doubt I'll die looking at the gun that's killing me and thinking "Oh, a gun." That will be my "passive" reaction.

My ex-Colonel bought nine liquor licenses in Polk County... when I came back to Winter Haven, he offered me a job. One night, a patron came in and said there was a guy breaking into a vehicle outside, so I made sure my .25 was in my back pocket and walked out and confronted the bastard.

He was laying on the bench seat of a pickup and had the stereo half way out..his feet hanging out the passenger door. When I asked him what he was doing, he lifted a hogleg off of his belly and asked me "Is it any of your bizness ?"...

I said F--K No, and slowly ran away.

No shit, and you were both very mentally prepared for a potentially violent confrontation and armed. You met a more determined and better-armed foe and retreated. So what's it like to have such passive reactions, and when do you think your slide into wussification began? Why didn't you, say, leap aside, slam the door on his legs, then dodge and weave around the car only to pop up on the other side and fill him full of lead?

it was too far to my back pocket...

Actually I had my peashooter in my hand, at my side.

But I didn't expect him to have what looked like
a .44 long barrel Ruger single action, in other words a damn Howitzer.. even if I pulled on him, he would have won.

but mostly, I was scared.. and he wasn't.

When two students get in a fight at school and the one getting beat on is punished the same as the aggressor, then I think the schools are teaching passivity. When hi-jacking victims or victims of other crimes are told to cooperate, they are being taught to be passive. I see it as worth discussing but not necessarily relevant to this so I should have left it out.

The point I was trying to make was that those who are doing the second guessing are probably not doing it out of meanness but out of a desire to believe that they are different and if this were to happen to them they would not be a victim. Bravado isn't an unusual response to fear.

hell no Marybeth,

the only thing I noticed is there is a bunch of folks (including myself) second guessing the situation.
When I was 8, a very large, very black man entered
our home at 3 am Sunday morning...later, my Dad thought of a lot of stuff he might have done differently, but the guy made it out of the house in handcuffs with a concussion and a broken nose, courtesy of a shotgun barrel and a fist...not in that order, but you get the idea..

The FIRST thing I thought was..WTF..Why didn't SOMEBODY take this guy out ?? But, the way I figure it is the law of averages says, (worst case scenario) that if a reasonable amount of warning
and space were available..SOMEONE..would have gotten to him..

He may have even hit the more formidable looking targets first, who knows..little prick.

He stayed on the move also, so no bystanders could
figure out where he was..or was going. So good for him. I figure he is wherever Adolph and those
guys are.

Bravado of those sitting safely at home or in their office has nothing to do with how the students could or should have responded. Wondering what happened, or could have been different, is not the same as second guessing as long as you aren't saying "they should have" or "I would have". We can't rewrite the past (unless you're a politician) so wondering what might have been is simply a way of dealing with the horror of the shootings. It may make us feel safer but it doesn't change what happened.

Could someone have rushed him and saved some people? Possibly, but 170 shots in 9 minutes doesn't give anyone much time and for all I know someone did try and by doing so increased the death count by one.

Read Steyn, Shaidle, Big Lizards, etc. You can find them all off the links in the Daily Gut. The hell if they're not running those students down and claiming how much better they'd do in that situation.

And no MaryBeth, the common response to FEAR is flight, fight, or freeze. Of course that's all after you mentally process why you're suddenly feeling fear. That's all nature has given us. Since none of us are currently in the middle of an instantaneous and life-threatening emergency, all we can experience from VT is ANXIETY. And we can control how we deal with that and what comes out of our mouths, to include saying how we'd have handled the situation a la Rambo. Oh, and saying the students were *passive*, thus implying they were instruments of their own deaths.

Yes, someone did try to rush him, a teacher and veteran who went toward the sound of the guns, and yes, he was mowed down.

A "victim of crime" covers a broad spectrum. Is it a crime of long or short duration? What are the stakes? Are weapons involved?
As a young ballet student, my librarian friend was standing alone on a subway platform when there was suddenly a knife to her throat and a man saying, "Give me your money."
"Kathleen!" I exclaimed. "What did you do?"

Was I expecting her to go kung-fu on his ass? She didn't know kung-fu.

"I gave him the money," she whispered, her eyes welling up.

Well, yeah. Cooperating was pretty wise choice at that juncture, don't you think? She valued her life at more than a few dollars. The whole crime took about a minute.

You're right, what I called fear would have been better labeled as anxiety.

If you ever get a chance, read Gavin De Becker's "The Gift of Fear." It's a fascinating read. In the attack on actress Theresa Saldana, she had her back to the attacker when he approached, and all he said to her was two words: her name. She immediately took off at a full sprint, not even turning around first to see who'd spoken to her. The tone of his voice had evoked fear and that little tiny part of her brain in charge of survival had screamed "Run!" and she went with it. I always thought that was so interesting. Of course, running didn't save her, it was the intervention of a bystander and the happy coincidence of an EMS crew practicing across the street with a brand new invention: a pressure suit for multiple points of blood loss, but it was the best that she could personally do at that time to save her own life.

Yeah, I don't understand how the VT students were passive either. Running from a guy who's shooting at you is not passive, nor is hiding or blocking the door. It's not like they were just sitting there looking at him, saying, "Our feminized society has weakened me to the point where I don't care whether I live or die."

Bravado isn't an unusual response to fear, nor is their anger when it's pointed out to them that bravado is all it is.

I'm a gun-owning redneck raised to meet force with force, and even I wouldn't dare open my yap about how individuals react in the face of sudden, extreme, and unexpected violence, or aver that I would have somehow behaved differently. Then again, I'm not much into blaming innocent crime victims who were minding their own business when their world suddenly erupted in intense violence.

When my dad was a 17-year-old Navy armed guard in WWII on a ship off the Carolina coast bringing up copper from S. America, he was getting ready to fire on a U-boat that was trailing the convoy. "Nooooo," said the captain. "Let's not and deliver our cargo instead." I love brave people, even temerous ones like my little daddy. But I don't expect everyone to react to danger with complete disregard for their lives. I think it was Ace who said that's why we have the word "hero," because it's not the norm.

The guys that bowed up at Cho got it first...you can bet. This wasn't what I think most people envision, because it's hard to envision the stark reality of what he did.