This whole Virginia Tech situation should, fundamentally, not be about gun control. It should be about what has happened in our society to allow this to happen. The response from the left has been about violence, war, and controlling weapons. The response on the right has been about government regulation and the nanny state. There is an issue that dovetails here that I believe needs to be talked about more. The death of any true conception of manhood.

Consider the school massacre years back in Canada. A gunman broke into a room, forced all the men out of the room into the hallway, and then executed one by one all the women. The men made no effort to resist and abandoned their female compatriots. Would this have even been conceivable a hundred years ago? Has radical feminism so neutered masculinity that self-sacrifice is no longer a virtue?

Maybe we need to revive the old WW”JW”D (What Would John Wayne Do?). John Wayne would’ve fought the gunman and maybe died in the process but died with honor and hopefully saving lives in the process. What honor is there in being marched out of the room only to have all the women left in the room killed?

Skip ahead to Virginia Tech, a campus without guns, without a means to protect itself, and yet the one shining paragon of heroism coming out of the attack is a 70 year old holocaust survivor. There are unconfirmed reports that students were lined up and shot execution style and yet no one charged him. I can’t say what I would do in the situation, but I know what would be the right thing to do: charge the man and try to stop him from killing your classmates. There is no doubt that there are many stories of heroism at Virginia Tech, but we need that John Wayne aura back in manhood today. To do that we need to find these stories of heroism and talk about them MORE. The students who blocked the door as gun fire was coming threw the table they held against the door, those are the stories we need to hear.
In the Texas Tower shooting in the 60s, a sniper went on top of a tower and started shooting at campus. The response? Several teachers grabbed their guns from their cars and offices and opened fire back on him. They put themselves in harms way, but that was their duty. How far we have come.
To die saving your friends should be the highest honor, but today I worry that it is no longer viewed that way. Maybe it all started after WWI when we threw out “Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.” Just a thought.