Did no one fight back?

Yet another horror story about mass murder, this time from Virginia Tech. My question is whether these victims (like the ones at Columbine) were massacred without fighting back, even the group of students in the German class, even while the killer was reloading.  Surely there were some athletic types among the 32 dead and 15 wounded; I wonder if any of them tried to rush the guy.

I'm not blaming the victims here. I can 't know for sure that I'd react any differently myself. It's tough to force yourself instantly into an aggressive mindset, especially with a gun being pointed at you or fired at others. It's even tougher when you've been conditioned from childhood to be peaceful, and have never been trained how to respond to a sudden life-or-death threat like this.

But we're insane if we think we don't need to prepare for a recurrence of this kind of evil. As a society, we need to be training our young people — in fact, all our citizens — that a Columbine- or Virginia-Tech situation is a clear exception to the general rule of peaceableness.

When, not if, such an abomination happens again, no matter what weaponry the killer has, every one of us needs to be mentally prepared to resist, immediately and violently —  to the death if necessary —  if for no other reason than to give others a better chance of survival.

(If we need role models, we need look no further than the courageous passengers of United Airlines Flight 93, or the ones who successfully subdued the shoe bomber.)

Several times now I've told my teen-agers:  If, God forbid, you're ever in a situation like that, don't just wait around to be massacred — FIGHT!  Charge at the shooter, screaming like a maniac; claw at his eyes; kick him (and it's always a "him") in the balls; try to wrestle his gun away; holler for others to help. You may surprise and scare him enough to where you and others might be able to subdue him. Even if you're killed, you may save others by helping to limit his killing spree. 

I'd be devastated if one of my kids were ever killed like that. But I'd rather they died fighting — and I'd sure rather die that way myself — than just sitting and waiting to be slaughtered.

Comments

[Joseph O'Leary]

Amazing how quickly Americans have jumped in to assure everyone that these incidents have NOTHING to do with gun control.

One horrific aspect of this sickening incident is that the first killings were considered so ordinary and undramatic that the University did not even alert the students (which would have prevented the massacre two hours later). It seems that individual killings are now so common on US campuses that they do not make the headlines. See http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article2455029.ece

[Joseph O'Leary]

A Le Monde blogger notes:

En cas de “shooting” (fusillade se déroulant dans une école, une poste, une entreprise ou directement dans les locaux de CNN comme l’autre jour), les media européens ont généralement un titre tout fait:
- "Cette fusillade relance le débat sur les armes à feu aux Etats-Unis."
N’en croyez rien.
Cela fait des heures que les télés couvrent la fusillade de Virginia Tech.
Il n’a été question nulle part du problème du contrôle des armes à feu.

[V Knutsen]

Quote from initial article

"(If we need role models, we need look no further than the courageous passengers of United Airlines Flight 93, or the ones who successfully subdued the shoe bomber.)"

Yes! Unfortunately our kids need to be more streetwise than we needed to be.

I was a little girl when Richard Speck killed all those nurses. Almost as shocking as the mass murder (one by one) was that the remaining nurses were docile like cows. Noone smasheed a chair over his head or rushed him!