I know I am going to get hate mail and I may be rushing to judgment. But it all seems to follow such a familiar pattern. Terrified students lined up against the wall of their classroom and shot, execution-style. Once again, this time in a campus filled with young men and women military age, a lone bully seemed to have been able to go on a rampage without anyone trying to actively stop him. What did the students and faculty do? They either cowered behind furniture or locked their door. He, of course, went on to shoot the students next door. Once again, as Bill Bennet noted, heavily armed men were seen swarming OUTSIDE assessing the situation!

As this murder spree took place on Holocaust memorial day, it is not be surprising that the one man who said"Never again" was a 76 year old professor, a holocaust survivor.

He did the best he could, blocked the door with his body and told his students to flee. Of course, it would have been better if had he told them to attack.

You think I am too harsh? believe it or not, Mahatma Gandhi shared my view. Per chance, I as reading Mohandas yesterday and it included his response to the information that Hindu homes had been looted in Sharanpur in Western UP, an a housewife assaulted without the local Hindus putting up a fight. He emphasized that he was not asking Indians to respond with absolute non violence to villainy, or against"thieves, robbers or . . . nations that may invade India. He added:

As a Hindu I am more ashamed of Hindu cowardice that I am angry at the Mussulman bullying. . . . Where there are cowards, there will always be bullies."

Of course, standing up to bullies is no longer expected even of trained fighters. How can one expect young people at a university to behave more courageously than British marines confronting Iranian bullies? We better. For as Gandhi predicted, in the current atmosphere bullies are multiplying and the price of continuing to go as sheep to slaughter is getting higher and higher by the day.

Nathan Machula - 4/18/2007

Except Gandhi had different advice for the Jews:

"The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. Collective suicide would have been heroism."

RJ Vecchio - 4/17/2007

It is perhaps a mark of the increase in devotion to nonviolence in our society that it takes Americans a very long time to decide that they should, indeed must, engage in it even to defend themselves. On Flight 93 it took the passengers quite a while to organize even after their cellphones told them what had happened to the other three planes. We no longer have a society in which many young college students have slaughtered animals, or hunted, or been in many fights (if any), and their safe and privileged lives have left them too shocked by naked violence to respond other than by hiding or flight. This is understandable, if tragic in its way.
What is NOT understandable is how here, as in Columbine, the armed police are so hesitant to move forward aggressively to find and neutralize the threat. Bureaucratic policies and procedures seem to paralyze them during such events. It's time for law enforcement agencies to rethink emergency response procedures.