I Do Not Understand.

The thing I do not understand about this mass murder in Virginia is that nobody seemed to have tried to tackle this nutcase. It seems to have been bred out of our kids, the ability to attack even when losing is a foregone conclusion.

Somewhere between when I was a child and today, something important was lost. When I was born there were still a few Civil War veterans alive, not many but some. There were even more survivors of the Spanish American War, men who had charged up Kettle Hill with Teddy Roosevelt. Men who had gone up against the Spanish Mausers while they were armed with single shot Trapdoor Springfields. Men who walked uphill, unable to shoot because the Spaniards were out of range. Those Spaniards were able to shoot, though. That's the difference between their 7mm Mausers and our .45-70s.

My Grandfather's generation went "over the top" in WW1. They charged across hundreds of yards of open, muddy fields, through barbed wire in the face of machine gun fire. My Dad's generation went across the beaches of Normandy and waded a mile through the water to get to the beach at Tarawa. My generation had the hill fights and the battle of Hue City.

When I was a child we fought back. It was important that we did not start fights but we were expected to finish them. It didn't matter if the other kids was a full head taller and forty pounds heavier, we were expected to fight back. Just as those men of the civil war would, when pushed out of a position, back away. In an age where any body hit was eventually fatal because there were no antibiotics, it still meant something to those men to not be hit in the back.

Today's children are punished for fighting back. No matter how they get attacked they get punished for fighting back. So, today, when evil walks, as it will, all these kids hide helplessly. Young men and women, older than the men of Gettysburg and Tarawa not only can't fight back against one small guy with a gun but they can't even barricade the damned doors.

That guy who shot all those girls in the college up in Canada, he ordered the men out while he lined the women up. The men went. They went.

What happened? What, in God's named happened to the young men and women of our society? A whole roomful of healthy young men and women, killed. Not killed trying to drop this skinny kid under a hail of German textbooks but killed, cowering.

Who taught the grandsons of the heroes of Iwo Jima this behavior? Is it not time to purge those people from positions of authority?