Posted on 04/16/2007 1:58:00 PM PDT by FoxPro
As I drove past the Virginia Tech campus just a few minutes ago, I could see the line of ambulances, queued up to receive the dead. It seems that every Virginia State Trooper is here in our little corner of the Appalachian Mountains. Blacksburg is a wonderful southern town. Think Mayberry in the Andy Griffith show. On July 4th they have the hokey parade down Main Street with the fire engines, police cars and restored Model T’s. This is the place where I once walked into city hall and asked to see the mayor. The man I asked said “I am the mayor, what do you need?” Try that in your town.
I live a few hundred feet from Norris Hall on the Virginia Tech campus. If I was outside this morning I would have heard the gunshots. What I did hear around 10 am was the loudspeakers on campus blaring out “EMERGENCY, STAY INSIDE, STAY AWAY FROM THE WINDOWS”. I immediately barred my doors with a pair of skies (no dead bolts) and set a butcher knife next to my mouse pad. There are times when you really wish you owned a gun.
So this is what Blacksburg will be known for, the worse mass shooting in history.
Will they tear down the building where this took place, Norris Hall? Could you concentrate in a room where you knew a dozen people were shot to death recently?
It just seems so unfair that one deranged man could plunge such a nice little corner of Virginia into infamy.
And the ambulances continue to queue up at Norris Hall.
But the people I’ve got real heartburn with are the people who were supposed to come and rescue them. Yes, I’m referring to the police shown getting themselves organized while crouching behind trees and squad cars outside Norris Hall. And this criticism especially is directed at the SWAT types in their helmets, flak jackets, and high power automatic weapons.
What the hell is all that gear for?
What the hell is all that training for?
Bragging rights down at the local bar?
Some extra bucks in the paycheck?
Oh, is it so they can go in and confront and outgun the bad guy?
Oh, really?
Well, you couldn’t prove it by the way things went down in Norris Hall.
The officers were probably very good at getting the students out. They’ve trained for it; all very organized and professional, I’m sure. Maybe they should have been more concerned with finding and killing the shooter quickly.
The very moment the first shooting started in Norris Hall, it should have been full of cops - armed with whatever they had - ready or not - confronting anything that even remotely resembled a shooter. And, even if one went down, they should have kept coming at him hard until they got him.
As it was, the killer roamed the halls for what? An hour or more. Unchallenged, it appears. They didn’t even kill the SOB. He shot himself.
Yes, maybe a few cops and innocent students might have been killed or injured. But in the calculus of this day, that would have been an improvement.
Their caution actually aided the murderer ... 32 (possibly more) dead, a score more wounded.
Yes, this is harsh, and I'm probably wrong but there's enough here to know they didn’t exactly cover themselves with glory today either.
I’ve been in only one situation even remotely similar to this and I panicked. A police car drove right past me and my abductor when all I needed to do was turn the wheel and cause an accident to free myself. When the time came that the truck was slowed down enough I jumped out and ran as fast as I could, even weaving back & forth because I was convinced I would have a few rounds coming my way. But I learned on that day that people do panic, it happened to me. When you’re stuck inside 4 walls, the fight-or-flight syndrome can go off into the weeds. As a p.s. to this story, about 15 years later I saw an article that had a picture of someone who looked like him, so I read the article — it was about a guy who had been executed in California for picking up hitchhikers, raping, torturing & murdering them.
Other than that, I find myself nodding in agreement to what you posted. When I see the videos of Columbine, Rodney King, Virginia Tech, et al, I see a lot of police officers standing around. In the massacre at San Ysidro McDonald’s restaurant, one of the police lieutenants actually called out that the code was not Green (don’t fire on assailant) but it was Red until he got to the scene. There might have been 2 more lives lost just because he wanted to be in charge. But they’re full of high-fives when they go after 92-year old ladies who could just as easily be picked up at the grocery store. So whenever I see a situation like that where the suspect could have been picked up ahead of time at the laundromat or whatever, I put in a keyword of “adrenaline cowboys”. But this situation does not apply because the policy makers didn’t stand around and plan this activity beforehand, they just responded to a known dangerous situation and went into self-protection mode.
You probably had to first overcome that mental hammer lock before you were able to take some positive action (fight or flight) and escape. I suspect that, once you had mentally unlocked yourself, the time between recognizing your chance (for escape, in this case) and taking it was very short. (If not nearly instantaneous.)
Recovering your ability to act saved your life.
But that’s not what we are taught. Don’t fight back, don’t run, just comply. Comply until it is too late to do anything for yourself, effective or not. Compliance makes things so much easier. For the predators, to be sure, but primarily for the authorities. Unhesitating, unthinking compliance is a response that is so important to the civil authority (because it produces a population that is easy to manage - a phenomena termed around Free Republic as “sheeple”) that it receives constant reinforcement from our authority figures. And for those who trespass their dictum in some dramatic way, there is always the threat of a highly publicized prosecution. One that will be disastrously expensive to defend against even if you win.
No, the prosecutors and police would rather have people murdered in their homes and in public places by the thousands rather than risk having a populace that is sufficiently self-empowered as to be willing and able to recognize danger and take immediate action to end it. Thank God, we, as a people, are finally recognizing how crippling that compliance is and are turning away from it with the concealed carry and the “castle doctrine” laws that are being passed.
There is now going to be a lot of talk about reforming the gun laws to make it harder for persons to obtain and use a gun. This is wrong headed thinking. Just the opposite should be the case.
The criminals are already armed and they don’t care about the law. What criminals are deterred by (if they can be deterred at all) is the prospect of being killed or injured when they attack. If there seems to be too much danger, they will seek an easier target.
Whether armed or not, a law-abiding person is still a law-abiding person. Sufficiently trained, they are no more likely to use the weapon inappropriately than they are to misuse any other really dangerous technology inappropriately. There are 100+ million guns in this country. How many were used inappropriately yesterday?
What would have happened yesterday if the killer had to face the prospect of many guns being available for armed and trained citizens to immediately fire back at him when he started shooting in Norris Hall? He would have either: 1) been brought down quickly in a hail of return fire, or 2) have left campus and probably killed himself.
One final thought: Yesterday’s incident at VT shows, once again, how very vulnerable our society is to even one determined killer. This cannot have been lost on the terrorists. We either prepare to prevent an American version of the Beslan school massacre now or we will endure it over and over again until we do.
No, the prosecutors and police would rather have people murdered in their homes and in public places by the thousands rather than risk having a populace that is sufficiently self-empowered as to be willing and able to recognize danger and take immediate action to end it. Thank God, we, as a people, are finally recognizing how crippling that compliance is and are turning away from it with the concealed carry and the “castle doctrine” laws that are being passed.
***Bears repeating. I would hope that we could soon see some new forms of training videos for people who might find themselves in these kinds of situations. The name of the game is: Quick, forceful action will save someone’s life (if not your own, at least someone else’s). There are lots of examples of shooters brought down by rednecks going back into the parking lot to get their deer rifle or handgun and pin the guy down or even cancel his ticket. Flight 93 was halted from its deadly mission aimed at the white house by men armed with coffee pots.
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
Lincoln’s Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862.
Here’s another comment very similar to your earlier one.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1818433/posts?page=236#229
To: CBart95
Have you seen that cell phone video where you can hear shots being fired inside and all the cops are hiding behind trees outside. I’d fire everyone of them. The guy is in there killing people and the cops with guns to actually do something about it are outside hiding behing behind trees.
229 posted on 04/17/2007 1:48:40 AM PDT by kjam22 (see me play the guitar here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noHy7Cuoucc)
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Yeah.... this whole idea that we’re going to ban guns.... and then pay the cops to stand around hiding behind trees and cars while somebody is shooting an unarmed populace won’t fly very well. Understand, I’m in no way anti-police. I have friends who are on the force etc. But this ain’t Dodge City, and the reality is that most law enforcement officials today are better at generating revenue than they are protecting an unarmed populace from people breaking the law with a handgun.
Youre assuming they did nothing. This guy had a high kill ratio. Maybe some were shot while trying to get close enough to him to disarm him. We know some were shot while trying to keep doors shut etc. I think the problem is finding in a matter of seconds enough people who are willing or have the personality makeup to rush the guy, all at the same time, in a coordinated effort. And in reality, as he's gunning down people, that number that is willing to rush him probably gets smaller pretty rapidly.
Well said. We see a lot of government largesse these days in police & fire departments. Basically, in most suburbs, it’s pretty quiet and all you really need is about 4-5 tough guys who know what they’re doing. The rest are all support personnel & meter maids. Similar in fire departments. Now, I understand these guys are all heroes and they all have dangerous jobs; I appreciate that. They just forget that we are the ones who pay their salaries. Why is it so outrageous to think that firemen should be the ones picking up our garbage? When there’s a fire, we don’t care about garbage piling up, and being out on the streets all the time will get them out into the community and knowing the streets and conditions on the ground. Why is it so outrageous to think that police would make good maintenance crews? You hand out cell phones & video cameras to every city maintenance worker and have them doing a useful job until you need them, supervised by the police guy who went to the academy and is building them up for future service. Once there are no longer any employment queues for police/firemen then you know you’re getting your money’s worth.
“I would hope that we could soon see some new forms of training videos for people who might find themselves in these kinds of situations. “
Something good could come out of this after all.
Students Trained to Fight School Shooters
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1818981/posts
It sounds to me as if you were thinking, you passed up one chance and gambled that a better one would present itself. It did, you acted, and you are alive. I am sure you felt panicked. However, you acted rationally.
I only acted rationally later on when I made a determination that I needed to take some kind of action; it was after I had panicked. At the time I even KNEW I was panicking, which probably helped me to zero in. I had Providence because there was a second chance to affect the outcome, but for many of these students there was only one chance for “Let’s Roll”. They missed it. The consequence was death.
It might be one of those things where the older you get, the more you realize you’ve only got this one chance. One of their professors understood that, and he is a genuine hero who gave up his life to save others.
Professor hailed as a hero
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1818985/posts
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