Just FYI I read a follow-up story on the Casper murders, an article featuring an “eyewitness account” from a young lady who was in the class.
She said the murderer burst in, shot his father with the bow, and the class of (only) six students rushed for the door.
She was in her 20s, if I recall, and she ran down the hall to a restroom where she waited in a stall until a policeman found her there.
The class of six people possibly helps explain the lack of decent, courageous responders: you have a very small sample to draw from.
But the young lady’s response underscores everything you and I have been talking about: go and hide and wait for (government) help.
That’s just astounding. Hid in the bathroom ... presumably forever, if nobody had gone and found her. They could have gone to the next classroom and rounded up some help; maybe it would have been “How to type, very slowly” and full of football players ;-).
We’ve been talking about these issues in our homeschool association “Hobbit Club” this fall. We’ve been reading the book, doing projects, and this weekend we’re going to the movie. The oldest participants are about 14 years old, and the youngest are 6, and all of them instinctively recognize that in a crisis, you’ve got to be a man and not a mouse, as it were, or you’re a FAIL human being. They want to be heroic, if only so they can tell everyone about it afterward.
People like the young woman in the interview have all the wrong programming. Didn’t they grow up watching John Wayne movies? How did such a person reach adulthood in Wyoming?