VIRGINIA TECH

Like everyone else, I have been extremely disturbed by the shootings at Virginia Tech. I grieve for the students, faculty and parents and the horror visited upon them by a madman.

But I have been troubled by something else. Besides the inevitable wails for gun control and the usual "it's all our fault nonsense",  I am bothered by the fact lone gunman could line up and execute 30+ people. And they stood there and let it happen. Nobody rushed the lunatic. Nobody through a desk or a book or anything at him to slow his murderous progress.

This may sound harsh. And I do not mean it to be so. However, I wish someone there had the fortitude or courage to try something.

As usual, Mark Steyn says it all better than I can:

I haven't weighed in yet on Virginia Tech — mainly because, in a saner world, it would not be the kind of incident one needed to have a partisan opinion on. But I was giving a couple of speeches in Minnesota yesterday and I was asked about it and found myself more and more disturbed by the tone of the coverage. I'm not sure I'm ready to go the full Derb but I think he's closer to the reality of the situation than most. 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.