It’s pretty damn sickening the way the US right blogosphere are tossing around the Va. Tech murder spree as though the whole event were a new variation on reality tv – “Survivor: Campus Edition” perhaps – and grading the characters victims’ ‘bravery’ accordingly.
That American Chap, commenting at Tbogg, has an injection of reality for the armchair critics, most of whom’s only experience of real physical danger has been blood-poisoning from their pilonoidal cysts.
I’m getting *way* tired of wingnuts screaming about how the students should’ve “fought back” and were “pussies” for not counting the shots and rushing the killer as he changed clips (as if anyone would even be able to know what the capacity of the clip was).
This is all pretty disturbing to me. Many years ago, I ended up in the middle of something very ugly (armed robbery, going badly wrong) during which I had seen two co-workers (and friends, to boot) shot in front of me. I ended up looking down the barrel of that gun and can offer these observations:
However you think you’ll react in a situation like this, the reality is likely to be very different. Your conscious mind no longer controls your actions. The effect of having adrenaline pouring into your system ironically paralyzes you or makes you initially very unsteady. The sound of your heartbeat in your ears is so loud that it startles and confuses you. Your respiration increases to the point that you feel that you’re turning blue and you become disoriented with profoundly peculiar physical sensations.
What this all boils down to is that if you’re hit with a life or death situation, from out of nowhere, then this wingnut notion that you should rush the guy with the gun is complete horse-shit. As it happened, I had had a bit of serious self-defense training, due to the dangerous neighborhoods I was required to travel through. However, when you’re looking at someone out-of-his-mind enough to shoot a couple of people and they’re on the ground, bleeding quickly and horribly into shock, whatever plans you had to deal with this situation just ….vanish. In my case, I found myself actually surrendering up my soul to the universe. I saw him literally pull the trigger on me and found that I was frozen like a block of sub-zero steel.
Why the fucker’s gun jammed when firing on me rather than my friends is a weird cosmic thing that still haunts me. After a few seconds of watching him struggle with his pistol, it dawned on me (as if I had an IQ of about 40) that I had a chance, and suddenly that massive flush of adrenaline found an outlet while I threw him to the ground like a weightless rag doll (I swear, I could’ve pulled fire doors right out of their frames at that moment). I might’ve accidently killed him due to this strange primitive reaction happening inside of me, but someone pulled me off of him and I started (vainly) trying to help the wounded.
I’ve thought a lot about that 30 or so seconds of my life. Aside from wanting to scream “IDIOTS!!” at the ruff-tuff “why didn’t you jump him?” wingnuts, I have a sense of just how little these people understand about what goes on in the real world. When something like this (the Virginia shooting) happens, you find that you can’t believe it at first. The people that you see being shot must be in on an incredibly elaborate practical joke at your expense! Some part of your mind simply won’t let it be real,
[…]
Some part of your mind simply won’t let it be real, and when reality suddenly *does* break through (like a falling brick wall), you become, for all intents and purposes, helpless.
These assholes can taunt those who actually went through it and call them pussies, but the truth of the matter is that they have never stood at the precipice of death, having to make their peace with the world so that they can make that leap without carrying horror on their backs as they descend into the dark.
That American Chap | 04.18.07 – 6:49 am | #
[I’ve amalgamated two comments because the second was posted due to character overflow in the first.]
As it turns out the killer had been tagged a serious risk to the public by a local judge in court, after he committed several criminal acts of harassment against women students; but no-one thought to prevent him from returning to campus or from obtaining weapons. He was just another weirdo guy a little too keen on the girls. Nothing to worry about there.
There was tragic negligence from many of those involved in dealing with the killer all along the line, with only a couple of notable exceptions. But to the hateosphere the victims are to blame because they didn’t act like trained combat veterans the moment they heard a few distant pops. Wimps. They should’ve played more Call of Duty or GhostRecon.
Meanwhile there’re 140 dead from just one street incident in Baghdad yesterday – 4 times as many as were shot by one disturbed and desperate adolescent that no one gave a shit enough about to actually stop from destroying himself and everyone around him.
I should no longer be surprised that the right really don’t get the physical reality of life or death or war but every time it shocks me anew. To the wingers all this – school shootings, the Iraq war, the maimings, the bloodshed, the torture – all of it’s just one big first person shoot ’em up-action movie-reality show to be comfortably and vicariously experienced at at a remove via mediating electronica. Other people seem to have no actuality to them except when brought to pixellated life for a brief moment on-screen and then they only exist to be critiqued as characters in a movie. There are time when it seems wingnuits have no normal human feelings whatsoever. Fuck these people. Sometimes that’s all you can say.
UPDATE:
Slacktivist has been thinking about this too:
What is it that makes us need events to be superlative? The horror of Monday’s tragedy is neither enhanced nor diminished by whether or not some other tragic event was quantifiably “worse,” so why this insistence on ranking tragedies like some macabre Top-40 countdown?
Partly, I think, it’s the lazy trend of quantifying and ranking everything, from box office returns to fallen soldiers. The deadliest day, the biggest opening weekend, the worst massacre.
And partly, I think, it’s the desperate need to believe we’re special people living in special times, in “the most critical time in the history of the world.”
In today’s paper, the very same paper in which we reprint the “worst in U.S. history” description, we also preview a lecture tonight at the state university. The speaker will by Larry Colburn, who helped to stop the killing at My Lai. The monument at My Lai bears the names of 504 victims.
That massacre, it seems, does not count in the rankings. Nor does Balangiga, or Marias or Mountain Meadows. And so the rankings, it seems, involve some unspoken qualifications, the unpacking and exploring of which might be fruitful, but not just now.
Just now I don’t much care about the ranking of sorrows.
Me neither.