Creating a Passive America: “Dog Days”

I’m beginning to feel like my neighbor’s dog.

Two different headlines this week are the reason: one about a murderous shooting spree and the other detailing a high school classroom scuffle. And if you’ll grant me just a minute or three of your time, I promise I’ll explain.

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The shooting spree to which I’m referring is the recent one at Fort Hood. Tragically, the number of folks killed and/or wounded was unquestionably higher than it needed to be due to no personal firearms being allowed on base, a factor obviously known by the shooter. The same can be said about last year’s shooting at the Navy Yard, as well as the first shooting at Fort Hood back in 2009.

A lifting of this rule would have two fairly obvious effects:

1. The next man or woman who attempted to fire upon innocent folks at a military base would no longer be firing on UNARMED personnel. They’d be firing at people who not only possessed guns but who’d been thoroughly trained how to use them. And
2. the very fact that it would be well-known that everyone was likely armed may be enough to disabuse a person (even a crazy one) from trying such a thing in the first place.

The no personal firearms rule on base is not a long-standing edict, having only been passed in 1992. According to the Military Times, prior to that policies governing firearms had been largely left to individual base commanders. But as these incidents readily attest, the wisdom of the new rule is (at best) highly questionable.

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And for the other news item I mentioned (the one concerning a classroom scuffle), please consider these events from a Santa Monica high school.

(via The LA Times) – “…A Santa Monica High School teacher was placed on leave Friday after he was caught on a cellphone video in an altercation with a student. The incident took place in a classroom at the high school and was recorded on cellphone videos by several students, according to the superintendent of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District…” 

The Superintendent described the event as “utterly alarming” and “deeply disturbing”:

Based on what she viewed on the videos, Lyon told parents that the kind of physical restraint used by the teacher was unacceptable. 

Wait. What????

The TEACHER’s actions were “unacceptable”?

So, the student gets confronted by the teacher for dealing drugs in the classroom, and then according to witnesses that same student begins the actual altercation by punching the teacher in the face. This teacher (who is also the wrestling coach) manages to subdue the kid without throwing a punch, and holds him on the ground while school administrators are summoned.

Yet given all that, which the Superintendent plainly knew prior to sending her letter, she immediately found fault with… the teacher. It was only after a tremendous outpouring of support from the parents for the teacher that she changed her stance and apologized:

In a statement sent to the “community” over the weekend, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District Superintendent Sandra Lyon acknowledged that her remarks about the teacher and wrestling coach have “caused great anger.”

“There is concern that my statement reflected a pre-judgment of the teacher’s conduct prior to completion of an investigation,” she said. “There is also concern about my failure to address the conduct of one or more students who were involved in the incident. In retrospect, I understand how my statement has created these concerns. 

I apologize …”

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Each of these events sheds light on a trait that was never associated with our nation until recently: trained passivity. Day by day, we’re being taught to cower or duck in times of danger: “Don’t act. Run. Hide.” As if we’re supposed to hope that maybe the bad person will stop of their own accord, or eventually go away.

We’re teaching this to our citizens and our warriors alike. Regardless of whether the aggressor is a 16-year-old kid or a crazy guy with a gun, the instructions are always the same now: Don’t. Fight. Back.

And this has been building for quite a while. Remember this from back in 2012?

U.S. Border Patrol Agents, along with others under the authority of the DHS and President Obama, are being told to “run and hide” if they encounter an active shooter…

***(By the way, the training and test for ‘IS-907-Active Shooter: What You Can Do‘ is still available online. I just took a quick look and even though it says it was updated in 2013, no major changes were noticeable).

As we saw in the Santa Monica high school example, the knee-jerk response inside of government facilities is now the same as it is outside. Heck, these days we even see folks routinely getting fired from their jobs for doing what once-upon-a-time would have earned them praise, commendations or at the very least a ‘Thank-you’.

Times have certainly changed.

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But as I initially mentioned at the beginning, all of this put me in mind of my neighbor’s pooch. Why?

Think about it: did you ever train a dog to stay in your yard? Whether using a rolled-up newspaper or some newfangled ‘shock collar’, the effect is largely the same: once he’s associated the property line with pain, your training is complete. Fido will now happily observe those invisible boundaries totally on his own recognizance, …forever.

Which means that while the size and scope of their respective ‘yards’ may differ, there is no longer any appreciable difference between a properly domesticated canine and the Left’s ideal American citizen.

Woof.