Here’s more:
This is the masculinity we so often hear denigrated. It takes as its duty the physical protection of others, especially women. This masculinity doesn’t wait for verbal consent or invitation to push a person out of harm’s way. It sends hundreds of firefighters racing up the Twin Towers to save people they’ve never met. And it sent Sgt. Ron Helus of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office rushing into Borderline Bar and Grill, where the shooter was waiting for him. “I gotta go handle a call,” Helus had just told his wife over the phone. “I love you.”
The way so many women have a natural ease with caring for children, so, too, do many men have the instinct to protect and serve. We can harness it, but it doesn’t proceed automatically. It is a refined sort of masculinity that must be developed and praised. The military has done this for years. Police academies and fire departments do too. Only the educated classes have learned to sneer at it. Would that they never need it.
There will always be young men like the Thousand Oaks shooter, full of rage, mentally unstable, living with mom, failing to launch. We can work to eliminate the threat they pose, or treat whatever mental disease hobbles them. But we will never stop every malefactor from obtaining a weapon. The extended magazine that enabled the shooter to fire so many rounds is already illegal in California.
We will also never entirely eradicate evil. But if we continue to disparage heroism—if we repeatedly shame those who want to protect women—we can suppress the impulse. We are no doubt doing so already. Somehow, Mr. Wennerstrom and his buddies missed the lecture that young women don’t require protection. Many lives were saved as a result.
Ms. Shrier is a writer living in Los Angeles.
I don’t understand what this has to do with masculinity. These people recognized the danger and behaved heroically to try to protect people and help them escape. I give them my respect. But if it had been a woman who threw the chair through a window and helped people escape I would still call her a hero, not masculine. Think of female members of the military, athletes, EMTs, etc. who could have done the same had they been in that position. Acting heroically is not limited to one sex.