I've been mostly deeply reflective on the whole Virginia Tech story, but I swear to god it's not going to keep me up until 3 in the morning tonight. So in a more cranky mood I'm going to pick up on the meme of self-defense.
A lot of poeple, like those who hang out at Yglesias (not the Spanish chruch, the churlishly prolific liberal pundit), are calling Malkin an idiot. Being an optimist, I'd say they're half right but for the wrong reason. Malkin says students should be armed. I think they shouldn't be because I think that's paranoid. I think that the cops should be a lot more functional than they've been considering that among many better police departments there exists a post-Columbine rules of engagement regime. If we leave the matter simply to 'self-defense' or 'fighting back' we get to the heart of the conservative position which is that we expect people to have some intestinal fortitude. That means confronting people who would dare step so far out of line. I think we on the right are all a bit upset that Jack Bauer was nowhere to be found and we let Cho do to his face what the good guys should have. Somebody should have put Cho down, and the fact that nobody did makes us all impotent.
The important question to the conservative mind is whether that
impotence is voluntary. I think we all know how Kim du Toit would
react, but there's wisdom behind that reaction as well and this is not
a new subject. What is not going on in the conservative mind is a calculation about
relative victimhood. It is unimaginable that anyone on the Right would
suggest (well beside Pat Robertson) that America brought 9/11 upon
itself. We are interested in doing what can be done. Better to be, one part hero and three parts fool than one part wise man and three parts target.
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