The Daily Gut

A STEYN MESS

Mark Steyn's full column here.

See Treacher's column - which I agree with in its entirety - here for background.

I like Mark Steyn's writing. I think he's got a lot of important things to say - particularly about the War on Barbarism we find ourselves waging - and I think he generally says them well.

But his April 18 National Review Online column, "A Culture of Passivity," is so wrong in so many ways that it should not be allowed to pass notice.

In his column, Steyn writes that the students at Virginia Tech who "allowed" Cho Seung-hui to pull off his massacre were grown men and women who should have been raised 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."

He maintains that "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."

And that sentence, more than anything else in the column, illustrates Steyn's wrong-headedness on this issue.

What Steyn apparently doesn't get is that Librescu - by all accounts absolutely the most heroic actor on that horrible day - no doubt understood the obligation to act not "instinctively," but because of prior life experiences.

Because the simple fact is that if you haven't been through something like that, if you haven't seen it before, you more than likely won't know how to act in the face of an insane, yet coldly calculating, killer. Indeed, Librescu was a Holocaust survivor, which in all probability means that back then he didn't fight back. This is in no way a knock on him, but it does give lie to Steyn's argument. And in fact, among the not uncommon response given by Holocaust survivors when asked why they left their houses, or why they got on the trains without a fight, is that they couldn't really believe what was happening, or they knew there had just been some mistake and everything would get straightened out. But how easy it is in hindsight to say "I would never have let them do that to me!"

Which, by the way, is exactly what Steyn et. al. are doing now, and it's quite frankly shameful.

Styen's 9/11 parallel is equally inapt: "Certainly on September 11th we understood. The only good news of the day came from the passengers who didn't meekly follow the obsolescent 1970s hijack procedures but who used their wits and acted as free-born individuals."

Again, not to diminish the heroic actions of the passengers on United 93, but the situation they found themselves in is not comparable to the one experienced by the Va Tech students. In fact, the passengers did nothing to prevent the original hijacking of the plane, in all likelihood because they couldn't quite believe what was happening. Recall that, prior to 9/11 at least, a hijacking was something Americans saw on TV or in the movies. Indeed, it was only after the passengers received word that other planes had hit the World Trade Center that they realized they had to act or they would die � had they not been privy to that information, they may well have done exactly what the passengers on the other flights did, which was remain as calm as possible and assume that they would eventually be freed by their captors.

Most importantly, the United 93 passengers had time � time to think, time to plan, time to act. They had everything the Hokies didn't.

Steyn approvingly quotes Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle, who says, "When we say 'we don't know what we'd do under the same circumstances', we make cowardice the default position."

What arrant � and arrogant � nonsense. Neither Shaidle nor Steyn has the slightest clue how they'd react, and they're lying if they say they do. In reality, when we say "we don't know what we'd do under the same circumstances," we make honesty the default position.

Finally, Steyn proclaims that "We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdom's security blanket." I totally agree with this statement, but I find it odd coming from someone who has never considered it personally necessary to be a thread in that security blanket, either by volunteering for the military or by serving in a law enforcement capacity. I'm not calling Steyn a chickenhawk � I don't have a general problem with people who support a particular war while declining to be part of it � but unless Steyn is a member of some private militia I'm not aware of, he is in effect surrendering his safety, and that of his children, to the official security blanket provided by the military.

Here's the bottom line: these kids (sorry, but as long as the drinking age in this country is 21, I'm calling them kids) were on a college campus, in classrooms and dorms, when a nutjob armed with two handguns walked in and started firing. And unlike, say, soldiers in a war zone, the students had no reasonable expectation that anything like this would happen, and I'm sure this fact alone made it completely unbelievable when it did.

And my guess is that Steyn, having never heard a shot fired in anger, would react the same way most of those kids did - by going into shock and shutting down.

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