What a shame Ben Carson doesn’t have the street cred of rapper Young Thug. The media might have treated the retired neurosurgeon and presidential candidate with more respect when he suggested that crime victims should fight back.
Carson was portrayed as another loony tune Republican when he made his suggestion after a mass shooting earlier this month at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore.
“Not only would I probably not cooperate with him (the shooter), I would not just stand there and let him shoot me, I would say, ‘Hey guys, everybody attack him. He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all,’” Carson said on Fox News.
“I would ask everybody to attack the gunman because he can only shoot one of us at a time. That way, we don’t all wind up dead,” he explained later on ABC News.
He drew much rebuke from a variety of critics. His timing may have seemed inappropriate but no more so than President Obama’s call for more gun control within hours of the shooting.
Carson’s suggestion wasn’t as ridiculous as the media treated it.
Remember United Airlines Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001? It was the only hijacked airliner that didn’t reach the terrorists’ target. When passengers learned what had happened to the other three hijacked planes, they realized they had nothing to lose and stormed the cockpit. (If you want to see what civilians are capable of in a crisis, read “102 Minutes” by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn. It details how ordinary people saved themselves and others inside the Twin Towers; they didn’t wait helplessly for police and firefighters.)
Carson’s fight-back scenario deserves serious consideration.
We have many gun laws, yet we also have an estimated 300 million guns currently in circulation. Suppose the Second Amendment could be repealed. What about the Fourth Amendment – how do we search for, and seize, those 300 million guns? Young Thug won’t be giving up his, and I’m pretty sure he’s got one, but nobody cares. It’s part of his persona.
In practical terms, is it reasonable to suggest that unarmed people should try and fight a man with a gun? That’s not a gun-control issue. It’s a personal decision.
Mathew Downing, who was anointed by Roseburg shooter/classmate Chris Harper Mercer as the “lucky one” who would live and receive his manifesto to pass along to the police, described what happened in the college classroom when eight students and their teacher were killed, and several others were wounded.
A couple of things stand out in his statement.
First, his quote: “When I saw the gun when he walked in the first thought in my head was that this couldn’t be real.”
This is where good, decent people are at a major disadvantage – especially when they’re only 18 years old as Downing is. For all of the crime news and movies and TV shows about crime, most Americans are still shocked by violent crime. The person initiating the violence, whether he’s armed with a gun, box cutters or something else, will always have the advantage of surprise. He literally and figuratively calls the shots, unless his victims can deliver their own surprise.
Second: Downing’s description of the gunman reloading two handguns with ammunition from his backpack. At this point, Mercer had already shot several students, so the remaining students had to know he was serious. Why didn’t they run while he was reloading? Probably because the gunman – at the very beginning – ordered them to lie on the floor making them feel even more defenseless. It takes more time to get up and run from a prone position. They were left with their hopes and prayers.
Had the police not arrived about the time Mercer was reloading, he may have finished them all off, leaving Downing the only survivor. (Unless he changed his mind about Downing. It was, after all, Mercer’s show.)
Carson’s critics pointed out that two persons attempted to fight back before Mercer reloaded. True, but their actions were separate and isolated. One was a man outside the classroom, an Army veteran who tried to intervene and was shot but survived; the other was a female student inside the classroom who was ordered by the gunman to stand.
Of that female student, Downing said in his witness statement, “She got scared and picked up a desk to defend herself, and he shot through it anyway and hit her in the leg.”
His reference to her being scared is peculiar. Who wasn’t scared? Still, she seized the moment and survived.
The saddest part of Downing’s statement is when he describes another female student lying near the front of the class, telling the shooter that she was sorry for whatever happened to him and for whatever she had done wrong.
“The shooter then said that he bets she was and shot her,” Downing wrote.
She had nothing to apologize for. Mercer had decided to shoot her when he walked into class.
If the entire class had known what awaited them, instead of lying down on the floor as ordered to, would they have descended on Mercer and given him a surprise as he frantically fired off a gun?
We’ll never know.
Just as airlines ask passengers seated in the exit row if they are prepared and capable of assisting in an emergency, there’s nothing wrong with considering realistically what you would do if confronted by a man with a gun.
The first piece of advice from the Department of Homeland Security’s “Active Shooter: How To Respond” is simply: RUN.
Next piece of advice: HIDE.
If there’s no place to run to, no place to hide, DHS finally advises: FIGHT.
Fighting requires full commitment – with fury and, frankly, a willingness to die without apology.
Of the victims who died at Umpqua Community College, the one whose picture touched me the most was Rebecka Carnes. Only 18, she had such a happy, hopeful face at her high school graduation. She’s holding her graduation cap with the words, “And so the adventure begins.”
She looks as innocent as Corinna Novis, a young woman’s whose murder 29 years ago taught me a lesson about fighting back.
Novis, 20, had moved from a small town in Idaho to Southern California. She worked as an insurance clerk at State Farm in Redlands and had friends at the University of Redlands. After she failed to show up for work, she was reported missing. Her body was later found in a shallow grave in a vineyard in Fontana, Calif. She had been strangled, sodomized, and her car was missing.
It would turn out that Novis, who drove a new Honda CRX, had finished work on a Friday and pulled into Redlands Mall at about 5 p.m. That’s where James Marlow and Cynthia Coffman – he was an ex-con, she was his girlfriend – spotted Novis. Her car was new so they thought she had money. They asked her for a ride to the university. Novis, who had a sweet, trusting face, said yes.
Once in the car, Marlow pulled a gun on her. What was not commented on at the time of Novis’ murder was that the Redlands Mall was located about a block from the police department. Yet Marlow and Coffman felt confident enough to abduct her when it was still daylight, in an urban area, with people all around.
It’s not blaming the victims to learn from their experience. From Corinna Novis I learned that it’s better to bolt and risk being shot in a public place, where at least others can see you and get help, than to cooperate and end up in handcuffs, duct tape across your mouth, in a house with people like James Marlow and Cynthia Coffman.
What would murder victims like Novis and the nine killed in Roseburg tell us if they could? Would they talk politics and guns – or would they try to make us understand that monsters don’t just exist in fairy tales and movies.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
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Near as I can figure Americans have become physically passive unless the problem can be resolved by committee action or critiqued by street theater (tape over mouth, slut walk, and etc.)
When I was younger a town near mine wanted a youth center. People got together and bought the land and then built a youth center. Can you imagine something like that occurring in Portland?
I sat in on a couple of meetings the city arranged to consider dog leash rules and dog parks. The upshot was that the dog people wanted the government to take action.
While charging villains who menace one with firearms and edged weapons is admittedly a different kettle of fish, the principle remains the same but with a greater urgency: you want something to change you might have to do it yourself and with your own blood and treasure. And, right now.
I also recall reading an interview w/a South African who had come away impressed by Americans in the early 1960s. NASA had come to that land to install tracking equipment. Not everything was ready to hand, but the Yanks improvised effectively and made it happen. He remarked that the Americans he now encountered were as from a different land than that of the 1960s visitors.
I recall a downtown after work evening some years past. A rather potted and aggressive black man was making passes at a woman who pretty clearly didn’t appreciate his efforts. I was pretty sure I understood the situation correctly and verged on stepping in – but I didn’t. Mix of women and blacks and white male just didn’t seem like it would have a good outcome for me.
So, cowardice in one of my components, too.
As a final note I’ve read of at least two occasions on aircraft where someone was acting violently and the young guys sat in their assigned seats, evidently hoping that the trouble would pass. And, both times men in their 60s stepped forward and got the situation under control.
I like your story about the youth center. No, I can’t imagine something like that happening now in Portland. (Although a group of citizens did save some sequoia trees, and a wealthy donor bought a historic house from its new owner who had planned to tear it down and replace it.)
For the most part, though, we have become increasingly helpless. I wonder how my parents’ generation fought a world war.
It may not have been cowardice that stopped you from stepping in during that situation downtown. It could have been good instincts, especially if you were the only white male.