{"id":55437,"date":"2015-10-02T10:30:28","date_gmt":"2015-10-02T15:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=55437"},"modified":"2015-10-02T11:05:50","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T16:05:50","slug":"heroism-is-not-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=55437","title":{"rendered":"Heroism Is Not Enough"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ll urge prayers, or whatever your worldview calls for, for Chris Mintz, an Army veteran who was shot seven times trying to save others<\/a> during yesterday’s mass-murder in Oregon.<\/p>\n

While the details are still sketchy, it appears Mintz was shot repeatedly trying to either protect others, or to stop the murderer during his killing spree. \u00a0He’s still in very serious condition with seven gunshot wounds, in the back, abdomen, hands and apparently legs.<\/p>\n

Mintz is, by all indications, a hero.<\/p>\n

And hopefully via the grace of God he’ll come out of this a living hero.<\/p>\n

But to paraphrase the vacuous suit that 52% of our low-information neighbors put into office, heroism is not enough.<\/p>\n

Chris Mintz is a big, strong guy – he’s apparently done some cage-fighting – trained to a peak of physical power. \u00a0And he was laid low – hopefully temporarily – by a coward with a firearm.<\/p>\n

But another hero – a 110 pound woman, a 70 year old man, a handicapped guy in a wheelchair – would have had a decent chance of taking the coward down even with a feeble little pocket .380.<\/p>\n

Exactly as happened on December 11, 2012,<\/a> just 120 miles north of Umpqua Community College, when Nick Meli confronted a man intent on mass-murder at the Clackamas Mall in Portland.\u00a0Meli and his Glock didn’t even need to fire a shot; the man, intent on mass murder and who’d already killed two innocent people. \u00a0The killer saw Meli, realized the jig was up (as happens with most mass-murderers when confronted with unexpected lethal force), and slunk away to kill himself. \u00a0Exactly as has happened at many other episodes<\/a>, where a “good guy or gal with a gun” ended a mass shooting before it became too “mass”.<\/p>\n

Victory for the good guys.<\/p>\n

But Umpqua is a gun free zone.<\/p>\n

How’d that work out?<\/p>\n

PS: \u00a0Heroism under fire seems to be in the water out there; one of the heroes from last month’s French train episode<\/a> was from the same area in Oregon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ll urge prayers, or whatever your worldview calls for, for Chris Mintz, an Army veteran who was shot seven times trying to save others during yesterday’s mass-murder in Oregon. While the details are still sketchy, it appears Mintz was shot repeatedly trying to either protect others, or to stop the murderer during his killing spree. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gun-free-zones","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55437"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55444,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55437\/revisions\/55444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}