The Best They Could

In recent years, there has developed a sickening but predictable reaction to any gruesome murder. In this case, it's a reaction to the horrific event on the Greyhound bus in Manitoba the other day. As with the Virginia Tech shootings last year, brave keyboard warriors begin casting aspersions on the victims and witnesses for not intervening, and puffing their chests out declaring what acts of heroism they'd have performed had they been there, lamenting the decline and wimpification of the West, and otherwise kicking the victims while they're down. JJ and the SadlyNauts document some of the blogospheric atrocities.

The odd thing, of course, is that only a few days ago there actually was an example of the sort of thing that such armchair commandos typically claim they'd like to see more of: people intervening actively and disarming a crazed killer in a public space. I'm speaking once again, of course, of the Knoxville church shooting. Interestingly enough, we haven't seen any outpouring of keyboard-commando praise for the people there who acted as follows:

By this time, the crowd was in motion and several men had already started moving toward the gunman, who had paused to reload, Parkey said. Someone wrestled the shotgun away and then Parkey, John Bohstedt and Robert Birdwell Jr. tackled him.

"The only thing he said was he was asking us to get off of him, that he wasn't doing anything," Parkey said. "We just looked at each other incredulously, like 'How dare you?' "

Parkey praised the reaction of members of the crowd inside the church, many of whom weren't normal congregants but had come to watch the performance. "I don't recall any crying or hysteria during the event," he said.

I suppose it's not surprising that our brave blogging warriors should not acknowledge any of this. First of all, to do so would be to admit that a bunch of unarmed liberals were in fact exactly the kind of active, courageous people they always say they're looking for. Second, to do so would be to admit some counter- evidence to their favoured tale of Western decline and decadence.

But looking at these two events, I think, could tell us something about crowd reactions in such an emergency. Why in the case of the Greyhound did people run, while in Knoxville they jumped the guy? Keeping in mind that I'm not any sort of tactical expert and that we don't know all the details of either event, I can still think of several important differences between the two situations.

1. Community. The passengers on the bus were strangers to each other; the congregants in Knoxville were a community. On the Greyhound, everyone was basically alone in a crowd. In the Knoxville church many people knew each other and could act together instantly. Also, since everyone was a stranger on the Greyhound, there was no immediate way of knowing whether the killer was alone or might have friends; everyone in the Knoxville church could tell who the interloper was, and that he was alone.
2. Time of Day. The attack on the bus happened at night in the dark, startling many people out of sleep. The attack in the Knoxville church happened in broad daylight, when everyone was at their most alert.
3. Roles. The passengers on the Greyhound were just passengers; nobody was tasked with the role of keeping order. In the Knoxville church, there were ushers and other people responsible for keeping things in order. People who have a role act differently from people who don't. Greg McKendry, who heroically sacrificed himself to save others, was an usher.
4. Physical space. A bus is an unfamiliar space, and a narrow one with limited room to move. A church, on the other hand, is a large open space, with lots of room to manoeuvre, hide, and act; it was also the congregants' home ground, with which they were intimately familiar.
5. Weapon. On the bus, the killer had a large knife; this is a weapon that never runs out of ammo and is lethal for several feet in every direction around its wielder. In Knoxville, the killer had a shotgun; this needed to be reloaded, was slow to reload, and gave people a few precious seconds in which to take action.

What all of this suggests is that the way that people will behave in these situations is, well, situational. The choices that are possible depend on where you are and what is happening. There's no overall story of civilization to be told here. In both cases, the victims and witnesses did the best they could in the circumstances in which they found themselves. They all acted remarkably bravely; but the differences in the situations permitted them a different set of split-second decisions. It's really, I think, as simple as that.