If not, then lay off of the VT students!
It's a current thread running around the blogosphere:
"Why didn't the students fight back? Why didn't they do something instead of just hide and wait to be shot? It would have only taken one or two brave souls to stop the shooter!"
Most of the time, the folks doing the complaining have never faced a loaded gun pointed at them, and I have just one thing to say to them.
SHUT THE HELL UP!!!
I have faced a loaded gun. I've told this story before, but it really applies here, so I'll tell it again. I was working as a night manager for a convenience store when a guy came in. He waited until the only other customer in the store left, then he approached the counter and pulled a gun. It was a small revolver, and he pointed it at me and demanded that I give him the money in the register. As I started to pull out the money, he changed his mind and told me to hand over the drawer. I did, and as he went to pull the money out, he set his gun down on the counter between us.
Now the adolescent hero boy that lives in all of us immediately speaks up.
"Wow! If I were there, I would have grabbed the gun and got the drop on him. And if he even twitched wrong, BANG! I'd a dropped that sucker in his tracks. Yessirree bubba, that's what I'da done."
No you wouldn't have.
I thought about it. The guy was high on something and moving slowly. I would have had a good chance of grabbing the gun and being a hero, and only small chance of missing and winding up dead. Well, let me tell you folks something. When you're looking at a gun, death is there in the room with you,and it's close, and real, and you have a completely different perspective. I believed that if I went for his gun and missed, he would kill me. End of story. Whether that belief was accurate or not is irrelevant; it's what I believed at the time. I figured that my best chance of avoiding that big ugly thing called Death was to cooperate and not give this guy any grief. After all, why would he want to kill me? I'd never done anything to him.
So I stood there until he finished taking the money, and picked up his gun again. As he walked out of the store, he paused and looked at me. I held perfectly still, feeling completely helpless. In my mind, he was deciding whether or not to kill me. At that point, I was wishing I had tried for his gun, but that chance had already gone.
Fortunately for me, so was he. He left without shooting me, and I quit shortly thereafter.
I was the same age as the students at VT
Folks, we're all indoctrinated from an early age that when the fight or flight reflex is triggered, flight is the better option. Why else to you think the military takes 8-12 weeks training a soldier to fight? You can learn to shoot a gun a lot faster than that! It's because the first thing they have to do is break that conditioning, and it takes awhile. The VT students did what they've been told to do when confronted with violence. Run away, or hide.
In many instances, that might be the right answer, but not in Blacksburg, and not the night I got robbed. In my case, I got off without paying a high price; the students in the classrooms weren't so lucky.
The bottom line is this; if you've never has a gun pulled on you, then you have no business talking about what those folks should have done, or what you would have done if you were there. So kindly keep your mouth closed about it.
Posted by Rich at April 18, 2007 6:48 PM | TrackBackIt's not about whether the VTech students should or should not have fought back, ran, hid or whatever. It IS about survival skills. Sometimes survival means acquiescing ... putting your hands in the air and doing exactly what the bad person with the gun says to do. Sometimes it means running and hiding until the immediate danger passes. Sometimes it means fighting back with whatever you have at hand - keys, pencil, throwing a chair. Sometimes it means sacrificing your life in order to save many others. The stories are starting to come out now, some of those students and staff had survival skills, some did not.
It does seem though that a great number of people in our society have lost touch with their survival skills. I am not referring specifically to the events at VTech, but in general. We have become a society of wimps, lumps of helpless goo that sit and cry and flap hands waiting for someone else to *do something* to fix whatever is wrong. I saw this in a most obvious way in the wake of Katrina.
None of us knows what we will do in a given situation until we find ourselves there. But to just sit and cry and wait to be rescued is to fail at our most basic of instincts, that of survival.
And yes, I can speak on this issue ..
Good post. I'm always very reluctant to second-guess the split-second choices that people make under duress. It's too easy to make armchair decisions. It's much harder when your life is on the line and there's no time to think.
Posted by: Les Jones on April 19, 2007 2:52 PM