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.
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.