Re: Not always joking, it seems

William Hyde wrote:
> On Feb 19, 3:35 am, "Marcus L. Rowland"
> <forgottenfutu...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> I often wonder when I see things like this incident; you have one man
>> with a gun, and several hundred people without one. How come none of
>> them tried throwing things at him? Ru****ng the stage? Turning the fire
>> hose on him?
> 
> Just to add an SF reference, Keith Laumer (in "Worlds of the
> Imperium", I think) has a scene in  parallel world in which people do
> just that, suffering serious casualties but bringing the armed men
> (beings?) down. The narrator speculates that people could still do
> that because in the given time line, WWI never happened.

	It happens in RL, too.  Flight 93, for one example.

	Another is Yet Another School shooting, maybe three years ago (I can't 
dig up the reference, alas), which did not make the news very big b/c 
the body count was so low.  The *reason* that the body count was so low 
was that the shooter missed with most of the shots he got off, and when 
he was reloading a couple of classmates with lots of hands-on gun 
experience saw their window of op****tunity and jumped him.

	"Take cover and/or run" seems to be the default human reflex when 
facing sudden, unanticipated deadly threat.  Give people a moment to get 
their bearings, OTOH, and things can change.  In a crowded lecture hall, 
with nowhere to really *take* cover and where most students probably 
*couldn't* run away (mob scene at the doors, no doubt), most of them 
probably didn't have that critical moment to recover their equilibrium 
and realize that fighting back in some way, *any* way, might well be the 
more pro-survival option than trying to hide behind the next-forward row 
of seats. (for some reason, the phrase "keepin' up the skeer" keeps 
rolling through my mind)
	Of course, that brings up the "bell the cat" issue -- in such a crowd, 
even if some individuals realize that yelling, throwing things, or even 
a kamikaze charge might be the better option... who's going to be the 
*first*?  Who going to *want* to be the first?
	The most truly dangerous people, IMO, are not the strongest, fastest, 
or have the biggest guns.  Rather, they are the people who can *process* 
the need to resort to violence when the need arises unexpectedly and 
carry forward without dithering or uncertainty.  I don't mean people who 
are *prone* to violence, but rather people who can react with regulated, 
precisely applied violence at need *instantly,* without needing time to 
get their mental feet back under them.  Some people seem to have this 
gift naturally, most others who posess it got it by dint of long, hard 
training (which is usually connected to military or martial-arts 
training).  I've known a few such people in my life, and they were 
interesting to be around -- never threatening or blustering, always calm 
and easygoing, and yet... you *knew* that they were absolutely lethal. 
Not needlessly violent, or overreactive, but... *capable,* in a way most 
of us are not.
	Still, Flight 93 demonstrates that even ordinary people can "charge the 
gunman," once they have a chance to process the alternatives.  Most 
likely, if passengers on any of the other flights on 9/11 had had enough 
time and information to realize what was going on, most of them would 
have done something similar.  As has happened since, with the 
shoe-bomber, or the incident where Greenpeace "attacked" the
International Petroleum Exchange in London 
(http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,148013,00.html).