It is harrowing. Don't read it yet if you're sensitive. I've provided an excerpt because I think it's important to understand what the people who survived the slaughter saw and did.. Not knowing makes it much more easy for people who were not there to be flip and glib and to posture about how it was unmanliness or a lack of "the spirit of self-defense" rather than the hail of bullets and the survival instinct that killed the students and faculty who died in Virginia. You can see Derbyshire's pathetically baffled, querulous, and of course inadequate response to criticisms (even, I take it, from his own tribe!) here.
I found it in the response which John Podhoretz posted at National Review Online to John Derbyshire. Since "Derb's" action movie fantasies triggered Nathanael Blake's pontifications on self-sacrifice and what it means to be a man (foolhardiness, apparently, and a fundamental lack of common sense), it's a response to that as well.
After this, I'm done talking about this. I want people who believe that guns solve the problem of evil to understand how this would only be true if you could keep them from falling into an evil person's hands. And Cho was evil, as I define it. He made certain choices. One of them was that any number of lives---and it's not his fault he didn't kill more than 32----were worth the price of getting his insane face onto the news. There are other reasons as well, but I won't get into those. Primarily, he made himself a monster. I won't give any further attention here to what he wrote, said, or did other than the one thing that matters because I don't think it serves any purpose to linger over the details. He made his own choices. He's dead. He doesn't deserve another thought.
For the information of John Derbyshire, Nathanael Blake, and all who sail in them: this, then, is what happened at Virginia Tech according to eyewitnesses after Cho left his first two victims and moved on to continue the slaughter. As there were plenty of goats on hand to bleat with them in the comments, and apologists to reframe after the fact the clear implications of the original text, it is an answer to them as well.
This is what happened:
[quote begins from The Washington Post, David Maraniss, "That Was the Desk I chose to Die Under"]
The first attack came in Room 206, advanced hydrology taught by Loganathan. There were 13 graduate students in the class, all from the civil engineering department. There was no warning, no foreboding sounds down the hallway. The gunman entered wordlessly and began shooting. Students scattered to get as far away from the door as possible. One bullet hit Partahi "Mora" Lumbantoruan, an Indonesian doctoral student. His body fell on top of fellow graduate student Guillermo Colman. Then the shooter aimed his two guns around the room, picking off people one by one before leaving. Colman, protected by his classmate's prone body, was one of only four in the room to survive. The professor and so many of his disciples, most of them international students, were dead. Along with Colman, the three who survived were Nathanial Krause, Lee Hixon and Chang-Min Park. Two other members of the class lived because they didn't make it in that morning.
In Jamie Bishop's German class, they could hear the popping sounds....More pops. Someone suggested that Bishop should place something in front of the classroom door, just in case. The words were no sooner uttered than the door opened and a shooter stepped in. He was holding guns in both hands. Bishop was hit first, a bullet slicing into the side of his head. All the students saw it, an unbelievable horror. The gunman had a serious but calm look on his face. Almost no expression. He stood in the front and kept firing, barely moving. People scrambled out of the line of fire. Trey Perkins knocked over a couple of desks and tried to take cover. No way I can survive this, he thought. His mind raced to his mother and what she would go through when she heard he was dead. Shouts, cries, sobs, more shots, maybe 30 in all. Someone threw up. There was blood everywhere. It took about a minute and a half, and then the gunman left the room.
Perkins and two classmates, Derek O'Dell and Katelyn Carney, ran up to the door and put their feet against it to make sure he could not get back in. They would have used a heavy table, but there were none, and the desks weren't strong enough.
Soon the gunman tried to get back in. The three students pressed against the door with their arms and legs, straining with their lives at stake. Unable to budge the door, the gunman shot through it four times. Splinters flew from the thick wood. The gunman turned away, again. There were more pops, but each one a bit farther away as he moved down the hall. The scene in the classroom "was brutal," Perkins recalled. Most of the students were dead. He saw a few who were bleeding but conscious and tried to save them. He took off his gray hoodie sweat shirt and wrapped it around a male student's leg.
The French class next door was also devastated by then. Couture-Nowak, whose husband was a horticulture professor at Tech, was dead. Most of Kristina Heeger's classmates were dead. Reema Samaha, a contemporary dancer from Northern Virginia, was dead. And Ross Alameddine from Massachusetts and Daniel Perez Cueva from Peru and Caitlin Hammaren from Upstate New York. Heeger was among the few lucky ones; she and Hillary Strollo were wounded. Heeger was hit in the stomach. A bullet sliced through Strollo's abdomen and frayed her liver. Clay Violand, a 20-year-old junior from Walt Whitman High in Bethesda, also survived.
Like those in other classes, the French students had heard the banging, or pops. "That's not what I think it is?" asked Couture-Nowak.
Violand, feeling panicky, pointed at her and said, "Put that desk in front of the door, now!" She did, and then someone called 911. The desk could not hold back the push from outside. The first thing Violand saw was a gun, then the gunman. "I quickly dove under a desk," he recalled. "That was the desk I chose to die under."
He listened as the gunman began "methodically and calmly" shooting people. "It sounded rhythmic-like. He took his time between each shot and kept up the pace, moving from person to person." After every shot, Violand thought, "Okay, the next one is me." But shot after shot, and he felt nothing. He played dead.
"The room was silent except for the haunting sound of moans, some quiet crying, and someone muttering: 'It's okay. It's going to be okay. They will be here soon,' " he recalled. The gunman circled again and seemed to be unloading a second round into the wounded. Violand thought he heard the gunman reload three times. He could not hold back odd thoughts: "I wonder what a gun wound feels like. I hope it doesn't hurt. I wonder if I'll die slow or fast." He made eye contact with a girl, also still alive. They stared at each other until the gunman left.
The small group of 10 in Haiyan Cheng's computer class heard the loud banging outside. She thought it was construction noise at first, but it distracted her. No, they were pops. Then silence, then more pops. Cheng and a female student went to the door and peered out. They saw a man emerge from a room across the hall. He was holding a gun, but it was pointed down. They quickly shut the door. More popping sounds, getting louder, closer. The class was in a panic. One student, Zach Petkowicz, was near the lectern "cowering behind it," he would later say, when he realized that the door was vulnerable. There was a heavy rectangular table in the class, and he and two other students pushed it against the door. No sooner had they fixed it in place than someone pushed hard from the outside. It was the gunman. He forced it open about six inches, but no farther. Petkowicz and his classmates pushed back, not letting up. The gunman fired two shots through the door. One hit the lectern and sent wood scraps and metal flying. Neither hit any of the students. They could hear a clip dropping, the distinct, awful sound of reloading. And, again, the gunman moved on.
There was more carnage in the hallway. Kevin Granata had heard the commotion in his third-floor office and ran downstairs. He was a military veteran, very protective of his students. He was gunned down trying to confront the shooter. His brother-in-law Michael Diersing, down on the first floor, heard the awful sounds and realized that the building was under attack. Diersing stepped out into the hallway with Greg Slota and noticed that the first-floor entry doors had been chained and padlocked. No way out. They shuddered to think that sometime earlier, as they were chatting or working or drinking coffee, the murderer must have walked right past their room on his way to chain the doors. Their room had a lock on it. Several students came rushing toward them, and they let them in and then locked up.
Room 204, Professor Librescu's class, seems to have been the gunman's last stop on the second floor. The teacher and his dozen students had heard too much, though they had not seen anything yet. They had heard a girl's piercing scream in the hallway. They had heard the pops and more pops. By the time the gunman reached the room, many of the students were on the window ledge. There was grass below, not concrete, and even some shrubs. The old professor was at the door, which would not lock, pushing against it, when the gunman pushed from the other side. Some of the students jumped, others prepared to jump until Librescu could hold the door no longer and the gunman forced his way inside.
Matt Webster, a 23-year-old engineering student from Smithfield, Va., was one of four students inside when the gunman appeared. "He was decked out like he was going to war," Webster recalled. "Black vest, extra ammunition clips, everything." Again, his look was blank, just a stare, no expression, as he started shooting. The first shot hit Librescu in the head, killing him. Webster ducked to the floor and tucked himself into a ball. He shut his eyes and listened as the gunman walked to the back of the classroom. Two other students were huddled by the wall. He shot a girl, and she cried out. Now the shooter was three feet away, pointing his gun right at Webster.
"I felt something hit my head, but I was still conscious," Webster recalled. The bullet had grazed his hairline, then ricocheted through his upper right arm. He played dead. "I lay there and let him think he had done his job. I wasn't moving at all, hoping he wouldn't come back." The gunman left the room as suddenly as he had come in.
When Webster opened his eyes, he saw blood everywhere. Some of it was his, though he didn't realize it until he saw blood pouring out the sleeve of his sweat shirt. The girl nearby was unable to speak, only moaning. Blood seeped from her mouth.
[quote ends]
I'm stopping there. There is a lot more that Maraniss can tell you in the above-cited article. I hope this shows that nobody died passively and that the options for these young people were: (1) die; or (2) try if possible to survive.
I'm done talking about this now. I refuse to focus on Cho or to speculate why or how he became the sort of monster who could do this. I won't read NBC's slaughter porn or Cho's twisted fantasies.
There may be a time and a place to talk about the "Europeanization" or "nannyization" of American culture. This is not that time and this is not the example.
But I hope that this account puts a stop to any further desecration of this hideous tragedy from those on the far Right (where everything, even tragedy, is somehow confused with "personal responsibility") and where guns are always the solution and never the problem. I am entirely outraged that anyone would endorse or excuse Derbyshire's remarks. The correct thing for him to do is to cease to defend it. I won't say "apologize" because---as a member of what Kathryn Jean Lopez ("K-Lo" to herself and others) jocularly if perhaps not all that wittily calls the "defeatist party"----I am sick to death of apologies and excuses from members of the immoderate Right.
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