Courage has nothing to do with it. The lesson is extremely simple--NEVER go to a gun fight without a gun!! To take on an armed, murderous foe with a text book in front of your face is the height of stupidity. What the hell do you think will happen? You'd be better off using your jump school traning to hit the ground off the second or third floor. What do you think he's going to do while you try to poke his eyes like some angry todler? SHOOT YOU!! For the love of Pete! Where do you come up with this garbage?
Cosmoline, sometimes you're faced with a high degree of certainty that you're going to die. Sometimes you face a situation where doing what you need to do to live isn't something you're willing to live with. Sometimes "doing the right thing" isn't the same thing as "living to procreate."
Scenario: you're sitting in class with 26 other people, on the 3nd floor, and you hear two shots. You look around and 2 folks are dead, you're 15 feet away from the shooter who's at the back of the classroom, and he's targeting his next victim. You're lucky and immediately recognize what's happening, curse yourself for leaving your weapons back in your dorm room, and you have 1.2 seconds to make a decision. Most of the folks remaining in the classroom are female, 18-20 (assume like me you're closer to 40 than 20), and are in shock.
Your options, it seems to me, are 3:
- Freeze, or try to seek cover. Figure this is your default, and you have a 1% chance of living.
- Run screaming to the window and hope you can hit it with enough velocity to break it instead of bouncing back, and retain enough control to perform a PLF and just break ankles and legs instead of your neck. Figure a 22% chance to do so.
- Go banzai while he's focusing on his front sight which is on someone else's head, and hope you can avoid a headshot so you'll be able to disable the shooter. Figure 18% chance of doing so, and a 5% chance to live if you pull it off.
You'd choose option 2. If I chose option 2 and knew that another 20 people died -- people who are
truly defenseless -- I'd regret that for the rest of my life, and would be shamed in front of the world when my story got out.
I know what my choice there would be. I don't claim that it's the smartest choice, but it's the one I would be proudest of. Call me a fool if that's how it looks to you, but that's how it looks to me. I won't even state that I know I could make this choice -- 10 seconds deliberation looks like it seals your fate, anyway, but that's how it looks from here, sitting in my computer chair.