Common cause

[unixronin]

There is a lesson to be learned from Virginia Tech and, by comparison, from the Appalachian Law School.

There is a lesson to be learned from United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001.

I could find other examples.  The Warsaw ghetto, for example.  But the point would be the same.  They all teach the same lesson.

That lesson is quite simple, and can be stated in two words:

FIGHT BACK.

If you refuse to fight back, you are betting your future, your life, and everything else you have to lose, on the goodwill of your attacker.  Where is the possible logic in trusting to the goodwill of someone who has just viciously attacked you without provocation?

Comments

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

You are putting up a straw man. There is, of course, no logic in trusting to the good will of someone who attacks viciously without provocation.

But that doesn't mean direct counterattack is the only alternative or always the wisest course. No one comes to class anticipating an armed attack; damn few groups of 20 or so people whose only common bond is taking a class together would be able to organize an effective counterattack in the time they had. It probably seemed a better bet to go out the window, or play dead; and so far, the only survivors I've heard of are those who did one of those things.

It would have been great if half a dozen people had acted together early to take that guy down, but you won't hear me asking the survivors why they didn't. Crazed gunmen, for all the media attention they get, are quite a bit rarer than earthquakes and floods -- and how well do people prepare for those?

It would also have been great if the mental health authorities had locked that kid up. Failing that, it would have been great if he'd had to show proof of rock-solid mental health before those who cater to the "well-regulated militia" had provided him with guns.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It would have been great if half a dozen people had acted together early to take that guy down, but you won't hear me asking the survivors why they didn't. Crazed gunmen, for all the media attention they get, are quite a bit rarer than earthquakes and floods -- and how well do people prepare for those?

Exactly. In these days, most people aren't prepared for such a possibility, but I think this is only partly because it's a rare event; it's also partly because so many people have been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that society will do everything for them, including protect them. (Which probably makes it even more of a shock when it doesn't.) When people were expected to be a lot more self-reliant, my impression is they were a lot more prepared to deal with danger, expected or not. Far too many people these days are unprepared to deal with any kind of danger, because they're been taught that they don't have to be, there'll always be someone to deal with it for them.
This isn't their fault. It's society's fault for convincing them they don't need to be prepared because it's Somebody Else's Problem.

It would also have been great if the mental health authorities had locked that kid up. Failing that, it would have been great if he'd had to show proof of rock-solid mental health before those who cater to the "well-regulated militia" had provided him with guns.

You know, proving you're not deranged in some way is the old problem of proving a negative. It essentially can't be done. It's like the swan problem: If you seek to prove that all swans are white, you must prove that every individual swan is white, whereas to show that not all swans are white, you need find only one black one. "Proof of rock-solid mental health" is an unattainably perfect standard. In Cho's case, we had the opposite: there was substantial evidence that he was unstable, and multiple people — both students and faculty — reported he was stalking women and that they were afraid of him ... but the NICS didn't contain that information, because the university didn't report it.
It turns out universities frequently don't report anything negative that's "handled" (or, as in this case, simply swept under the rug) wholly on campus, because, you know, if it's public record they had a problem, it might hurt the flow of tuition money.
Cho shouldn't have been able to get a gun. But the system that was supposed to stop him couldn't, because the system didn't know, because the university withheld the information.