Mark Steyn has an excellent piece, "A Culture of Passivity," in which he quotes Kathy Shaidle, "Remember: when we say "we don't know what we'd do under the same circumstances", we make cowardice the default position."

That's strange.  The word "cowardice" jumps up from that sentence and hits you in the face.  The reason it does is that we are not to judge the actions of people under stress or duress.  None of us wants to think of these young people and their teachers in terms of what they could have done to make the massacre less. It wouldn't be appropriate to say any one of them were "cowardly" in the face of this mad man. 

Yet the actions of the hero, an elderly man, give the lie to a non-judgmental assessment.  How can we hold up one as a hero and not wonder why there weren't more?  What was it about him that made him decide that he needed to sacrifice himself to save the many and no others made the same decision?  Perhaps the cynics will say that it's because he was elderly, that he knew he was at the end of his life anyway, and so it was an appropriate thing to do.  I would venture to say that his life experience informed his decision.   He has seen evil, he has lived through it, he had risked his own life to live in freedom.  He knew that there are some things worth dying for.

In a truly and literally mute testament to the passivity that Mr. Steyn writes about, I was struck by the accounts of witnesses when they related how it was that they realized that there was a shooter in Norris Hall.  All of the people that I heard interviewed said that they heard shots, thought they were something else (hammer, construction of some kind) and in one case, when they looked out the door and saw blood on the floor, they knew what was happening.  In one case, a woman came into the class room and said there was a gunman, which was corroborated by seeing the blood.  But no one said anything about hearing cries or screams.*

This is the extent to which the general population has been turned into sitting ducks: that they won't obey their most primordial instinct, to scream, when there is danger.  Screaming, shouting, warning: this is basic self and group defense.  We are so emasculated by the culture of "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" and the Sesame Street mentality that the idea of screaming, much less fighting back, is anathema.  Why?  Over and over again, as small children we are inculcated with "non-violence" as the ultimate goal of human interaction.  Self-defense is positively discouraged: school policy everywhere punishes self-defense and of course, retribution.  Everywhere you go, forbearance of aberrational behavior is taught: justice gets lip service, but the bullies have the advantage, always.  The civilizing of small children stops, in a case of arrested development, where society now generally endorses never growing beyond kindergarten, never to learn that there are bad guys who must be fought, with valor and courage.  All the better to become the clients of the nanny state, ever to be "protected" by laws (though not a concealed carry law), and as a last recourse, to get yours back by way of a civil suit against Virginia Tech, its officials, the police, and perhaps even the hapless surviving members of the Cho family.

For more on this topic, see also Michelle Malkins piece, "Wanted: A Culture of Self-Defense." 

* In this link please note that the class that had the presence of mind to simply barricade the door was saved after two harmless bullets because the shooter moved on to easier targets.  Lesson: don't make yourself the "easy" target.