Another random shoot-fest, another day when men failed to step up and be men. While others can debate whether an armed student body would have stopped Blacksburg gunman Cho Seung-Hui, or whether it's George Bush's, the Police or the university administration's fault I have to ask, where were the men?
Why, in shooting after shooting, is their never, ever one Todd Beamer? Before Marc Lepine shot his fourteen victims in 1989, he sent the men out of the room. Not one tried to stop him, knowing full well he would probably kill the women. That would happen in no other time and place in history; men simply wouldn't walk meekly away while the women were slaughtered. In Montreal in 1989, nobody even questioned it.
It happens every time, the complete lack of story about some guy who stepped up, succesful or not. It doesn't take an armed populace to stop a shooter, although it helps. Cho Seung-Hui walked classroom to classroom, opening doors and shooting. He was vulnerable every time he walked through a door, and not once did one of the men in the room decide, not this room, not this time.
It's not the mens fault, you can't blame someone for what they don't do in these situations. I can't promise I would step to the plate given the choice, although I don't know how I would live with myself after if I didn't. But it speaks volumes about the society we've created that not one person in that school decided to put the school, society and classmates ahead of himself.
Not one man said "I'd rather go down fighting," and that's part of the tragedy.
