"Protecting" our "children" at Virginia Tech.

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre and the magnificent reaction of the "Hokie Nation" to this tragedy it may strike a discordant note, but there are people who wonder at the fact that, with few exceptions, the Tech students were passive during the killer's spree. He was not stopped. The killing stopped when he put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger.

His thirty-two dead victims and 15 wounded means that he used at least 47 bullets. Given that handguns are not particularly accurate, my guess is that he used many more bullets than that.

Taking all the emotion away, it's reasonable to assume that he killed himself when he ran out of ammunition.

That's disturbing. Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia is a rural oasis and the largest University in Virginia. No effete bunch of urban liberals they. Yet the students and faculty - with a few notable and heroic examples (Professor Liviu Librescu) - were passive and panic stricken; either waiting to be shot, hiding under desks, or jumping out of windows.

Don't get me wrong, given the choice of jumping out of a window or facing a maniac with a gun, I'll jump out of a window every day. But in the end, the killer was not stopped. He just ran out of ammo. 32 people died and 15 were wounded while the killer's only injury was self inflicted.

In a way, that bothers me.

Mark Steyn talks here about A Culture of Passivity

On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our “children” need to be “protected.”

Point one: They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

There is - for those who wish to draw comparisons - a difference between the heroes of Flight 93 and the students at VT. The men of 93 knew they had nothing to lose. The VT students did not know this. Their classrooms would not crash, killing them all, and they hoped that they would survive when the shooting stopped. They were not all automatically doomed by passivity as were the passengers on the 9/11 flights. Perhaps that explains it all; a rational, mathematical decision: he can't kill us all because he does not have enough bullets.

And if the wolf takes one of the sheep, the flock still survives. But where are the shepherds? Or did they die with the survivor of the Holocaust?