As NRO's designated chickenhawk, let me be the one to ask: Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness' sake—one of them reportedly a .22.
At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren't very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can't hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren't bad.
Yes, yes, I know it's easy to say these things: but didn't the heroes of Flight 93 teach us anything? As the cliche goes—and like most cliches. It's true—none of us knows what he'd do in a dire situation like that. I hope, however, that if I thought I was going to die anyway, I'd at least take a run at the guy.
In the wake of this horrific event, to write something like this . . . Words fail me as I try to figure out how to describe this vomitous pile of letters structured like sentences. The only thing that makes this worse is his bringing up Flight 93, thus somehow finding a 9/11 angle when there wasn't any to be had. This is the vilest pornography. It certainly doesn't meet this community's local standard, and should be prosecuted as obscenity.
UPDATE: In the interest of fairness, I should add that, while not nearly as bilious as the above piece from National Review Online, the following excerpt from this pice at Fire Dog Lake by TRex is also unfortunate, because it attempts to make political hay out of the deaths of 32 innocents and one very ill individual. Perhaps in time we can have discussions such as this. For now, however, we should all just remain silent, praying to which ever God or god or goddess or gods or goddesses or nature or whatever that the families and friends of the fallen may find some way of making it through these next days. Sometimes all this talk on the internet can be just awful, and awful knows no political label:
This is a terrible tragedy, one that will be haunting us for years to come. Still there is a part of my brain that absorbs this kind of sudden and senseless catastrophe and responds, "Welcome to what the people of Iraq go through every day."
