A New Doctrine (Part II) Gail Heriot

I have no special knowledge of what happened in those classrooms at Va Tech.  It’s being said that the students offered little resistance, but it’s sometimes difficult to tell.  The surviving witnesses didn’t see everything.  And how could anyone who wasn’t there have a clear sense of what might have been possible?  The line between heroism and foolhardiness is not easy to draw.

But still I find the suggestion troubling.  What if it’s true?  Would a different group of adults at a different time or place have put up more of a struggle?  And would doing so have resulted in fewer, more, or just different deaths? 

Marc Danziger argues that the lack of resistance may have been a mistake, but that the fault lies with the “doctrine,” not with the victims themselves.  He writes that for many years the received wisdom has been that the victims of violence should be compliant to minimize violence.  If you put up a fuss, things only get worse.  It’s a strategy that may work well in some cases (like muggings), but it is useless in a the kind of mindless bloodletting that we saw on April 16th (just as it was useless on 9/11).  We changed our strategy with airline hijackings; we ought to change it for confrontations like the one at Blacksburg–or so Danziger writes. 

Danziger is fully aware that such a change is not easy.  The Va Tech victims were never formally taught not to confront violent criminals.  It’s something they picked up from their parents and teachers and from television and newspapers over a long period of time.  Moreover, it probably instinctive by now.  It’s not easy to un-learn such a lesson.   

Like my fellow Right Coaster Mike, I have some sympathy for Danziger’s view.  But I wonder if change won’t be even harder than Danziger suggests.  It isn’t just “doctrine” that influences the way victims will respond to deranged killers.  It’s their entire upbringing.  It may not change things much to tell people to fight back against (certain) aggressors if they’ve grown up being passive in so many other ways.

Maybe I am way off base here, but I am always surprised at how structured the lives of the children of my friends are today.  I do not believe I’m imagining it.  Weekends are filled with soccer practice, swim meets, and piano practice–all adult supervised.  In the evenings, it’s a movie with the family or some other adult-supervised activity.  There seems to be little time for the pursuits that took up my youth–hanging upsidedown from trees, running through the sewers and later getting in trouble at the movie theater.  Adult supervision was rare.

I have a hard time believing that this has no effect on children–that they are every bit as assertive when they are chauffeured around town to their various lessons as they would have been if they were on their own.  Of course, it has it upside and its downside.  The children I know today are more polite and better soccer and/or piano players than the children I grew up with.  (Yes, I realize that I may be searching too hard for things to worry about if I’m fixated on the fact that the children I know are more civilized than the children of my youth.)