Given that I devoted several posts to highlighting far-right, blame-the-victim lunacy in response to the massacre at Virginia Tech, I thought it only fair to underscore a high-profile conservative who doesn’t share in his colleagues’ crass stupidity.
The National Review’s John Derbyshire, as we all know by now, got this ball rolling on Tuesday, the day after the shootings, with an item criticizing the victims’ failure to take on the well-armed madman. Today, Derbyshire’s colleague, John Podhoretz, whom no one would fairly describe as anything but a die-hard conservative, brought some sanity to the discussion.
The notion that a human being or group of human beings holding no weapon whatever should somehow “fight back” against someone calmly executing other people right in front of their eyes is ludicrous beyond belief, irrational beyond bounds, and tasteless beyond the limits of reason.
“Why didn’t anyone rush the guy?” Derb asks. Gee, I don’t know. Because he was executing people? Because if you rush a guy with a gun, he shoots you in the head the way he executed the teachers in each classroom?
Derb claims proudly to be touching a “third rail” by raising something no one wants to talk about. The third rail is a metaphor for electrocution. What happened in those classrooms was no metaphor. It was a psychotic with a gun and a lot of people with no weaponry at their disposal. A few were astonishingly brave, and deserve to be considered heroes. Everybody else was just a person either in danger of being murdered, being mortally wounded, or being murdered.
In the name of old-fashioned and time-honored forms of human behavior, Derb has trampled on one of the oldest: Judge not, lest ye be judged.
Derbyshire hasn’t responded to Podhoretz’s rebuke, but NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez contributed a tepid defense.
Jpod, Derb’s point is one that has been echoed by other rational people — here and elsewhere. Folks ponder — and pray over — what would I advise my child to do? What would I do? Why do we hold that heroic professor in such esteem? Because he did something remarkable. But thinking and discussing what one would do in such a situation is only normal…and rational. And it’s also, I don’t think, condemning what those who were there and did what they did . But it’s not an irrelevant or irrational issue to consider — at home, on oped pages…
There’s a kernel of truth to this, I suppose. People do wonder how they’d respond to a crisis, and it’s hardly an unreasonable thought to ponder.
But that’s not what Derbyshire did here. The post that drew all the attention wasn’t just a thought experiment in which he “pondered” various scenarios. He wrote an item, just one day after the horrific incident, asking, “Where was the spirit of self-defense here? … [W]hy didn’t anyone rush the guy? It’s not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons…. At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him…. [D]idn’t the heroes of Flight 93 teach us anything?”
This wasn’t just a writer thinking what he would have done differently; this was a hack criticizing victims for exercising what he considered poor decision-making skills. These victims.
The first attack came in Room 206, advanced hydrology taught by Loganathan. There were 13 graduate students in the class, all from the civil engineering department. There was no warning, no foreboding sounds down the hallway. The gunman entered wordlessly and began shooting. Students scattered to get as far away from the door as possible. One bullet hit Partahi “Mora” Lumbantoruan, an Indonesian doctoral student. His body fell on top of fellow graduate student Guillermo Colman. Then the shooter aimed his two guns around the room, picking off people one by one before leaving. Colman, protected by his classmate’s prone body, was one of only four in the room to survive. The professor and so many of his disciples, most of them international students, were dead. Along with Colman, the three who survived were Nathanial Krause, Lee Hixon and Chang-Min Park. Two other members of the class lived because they didn’t make it in that morning.
In Jamie Bishop’s German class, they could hear the popping sounds. What was that? Some kind of joke? Construction noises? More pops. Someone suggested that Bishop should place something in front of the classroom door, just in case. The words were no sooner uttered than the door opened and a shooter stepped in. He was holding guns in both hands. Bishop was hit first, a bullet slicing into the side of his head. All the students saw it, an unbelievable horror. The gunman had a serious but calm look on his face. Almost no expression. He stood in the front and kept firing, barely moving. People scrambled out of the line of fire. Trey Perkins knocked over a couple of desks and tried to take cover. No way I can survive this, he thought. His mind raced to his mother and what she would go through when she heard he was dead. Shouts, cries, sobs, more shots, maybe 30 in all. Someone threw up. There was blood everywhere. It took about a minute and a half, and then the gunman left the room.
Perkins and two classmates, Derek O’Dell and Katelyn Carney, ran up to the door and put their feet against it to make sure he could not get back in. They would have used a heavy table, but there were none, and the desks weren’t strong enough.
Soon the gunman tried to get back in. The three students pressed against the door with their arms and legs, straining with their lives at stake. Unable to budge the door, the gunman shot through it four times. Splinters flew from the thick wood. The gunman turned away, again. There were more pops, but each one a bit farther away as he moved down the hall. The scene in the classroom “was brutal,” Perkins recalled. Most of the students were dead. He saw a few who were bleeding but conscious and tried to save them. He took off his gray hoodie sweat shirt and wrapped it around a male student’s leg.
Derbyshire had the nerve to question these people’s “spirit of self-defense.”
Derbyshire can write whatever he wants; that is his right. I have no desire to censor him, but I have no desire to forgive him, either.