Mark Steyn wets himself

Not that he’s not all wet, all the time, already. Still, the Virginia Tech massacre sure brought out the stoopid from the stupid in a major way. From the safety of his basement masturbatorium, Steyn, a closeted white supremacist who never misses an opportunity to whip out his weenie and kvetch that Evil Brown Muslims Are Out To Rule The World, worked up the incredible courage to apprise us of the following:

Every December 6th, my own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the "Montreal massacre," the 14 female students of the Ecole Polytechnique murdered by Marc Lepine (born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you’d never know that from the press coverage). As I wrote up north a few years ago:

Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The "men" stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

Now, this is just wrong on so many levels. Mainly on the level of fact, a concept with which Steyn is but barely acquainted. The press noted Lepine’s origins as a matter of routine; the feminists noted his violent background. Plus, there WERE male shooting victims in the Montreal Massacre; gee, it’s just a damn shame that none of them died trying to heroically assert his virility by wrestling the gun out of the murderer’s hands. Would have knocked Steyn’s intelligence-insulting bullshit into a cocked hat, if the Wikipedia entry on the Montreal Massacre were not enough to do so already:

Sometime after 4 p.m. on December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine arrived at the École Polytechnique building, an engineering school affiliated with the Université de Montréal, armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife. He had purchased the Sturm Ruger brand rifle, Mini-14 model, on November 21, 1989 in a Montreal hunting store, telling the clerk that he was going to use it to hunt small game. Lépine was familiar with the layout of the building since he had been in and around the École Polytechnique at least seven times in the weeks leading up to the event.

Lépine sat for a time in the office of the registrar on the second floor. He was seen rummaging through a plastic bag and did not speak to anyone, even when a staff member asked if she could help him. He left the office, and was subsequently seen in other parts of the building before entering a second floor mechanical engineering class of about 60 students at about 5:10 p.m.

After approaching the student giving a presentation, he asked everyone to stop all action and ordered the women and men to opposite sides of the classroom. No one moved at first, believing it was a joke until he fired a shot into the ceiling.

Lépine then separated the nine women from the approximately fifty men and told the men to leave, which they did. Speaking in French, he asked the remaining women whether they knew why they were there, and when one student replied "no," he answered: "I am fighting feminism." One of the students, Nathalie Provost, said, “Look, we are just women studying engineering, not necessarily feminists ready to march on the streets to shout we are against men, just students intent on leading a normal life.” Lépine responded, “You’re women, you’re going to be engineers. You’re all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists.” Lépine then opened fire on the students from left to right, killing six and wounding three others, including Provost. Before leaving the room, he wrote the word “shit” twice on a student project.

Lépine continued into the second floor corridor and wounded three students before entering another room and attempting twice to shoot a female student. His weapon failed to fire, so he entered the emergency staircase where he was seen reloading his gun by another student. He returned to the room he had just left, but the students had locked the door and Lépine failed to unlock it with three shots fired into the door. Moving along the corridor he shot at others, wounding one, before moving towards the financial services office, where he shot and killed a woman through a door window as she moved away after locking the door.

Next, he went down to the first floor cafeteria, in which about 100 people were gathered. The crowd scattered after he fired shots, killing a woman standing near the kitchens and wounding another student. Entering an unlocked storage area at the end of the cafeteria, he shot and killed two women there. Lépine told a male student and a female student to come out from hiding under a table; they complied and were not shot.

Lépine then walked up an escalator to the third floor where he shot and wounded one female and two male students in the corridor. He entered another classroom and told the three students giving a presentation to “get out,” shooting and wounding Maryse Leclair who was also standing on the low platform at the front of the classroom. He fired on students in the front row and then killed two students who were trying to escape the room. Other students dived under their desks, and Lépine moved towards some women students, firing on and wounding three students and killing one. He changed the magazine in his weapon, and moved to the front of the class, shooting in all directions. At this point, the wounded Leclair asked for help and, after unsheathing his hunting knife, Lépine stabbed her three times, killing her. He took off his cap, wrapped his coat around his rifle, exclaimed “Oh, shit,” and then committed suicide by shooting himself in the head, 20 minutes after having begun his attack. About 60 bullets remained in the boxes he had carried with him. He had killed 14 women in total (12 engineering students, one nursing student and one employee of the university) and injured 14 other people including four men.

Italics mine.

As you can see from the emphasis, at first no one took Lepine seriously. He had to fire a shot into the ceiling to convince them that he meant business. To me, that’s as much a mark of the Canadian character, male and female alike, as anything: We don’t stand in blind awe of wild-eyed gunmen, nor do we comply automatically with their demands. Our reflexive response is not an adrenaline-drippy “Oh, SHIT” or “Jump him!” but a cool, derisive “Are you for real?” It is only when we recognize that he is armed and we are not, that we act the only way rational people can act when confronted with madness: we try our best not to get hurt. If that means running or taking cover, so be it. As the saying goes, discretion is the better part of valor. Nathalie Provost‘s courageous attempt to reason with him is not unusual either; Canadians do it all the time, especially with Americans. Jean Chretien did it in 2003, when he attempted to talk some sense into Dubya over Iraq. The people who were separated by sex in the opening salvo probably complied with the gunman’s demand out of a perfectly reasonable hope that if they did not antagonize him, he would not shoot anyone.

Had any of the men in that room had an attack of adrenaline-masquerading-as-testosterone, as Steyn would have it, he probably would have been a dead man, right along with even more women than ultimately died. You just don’t banzai a man with a semi-auto–or for that matter, a six-shooter–unless you have a death wish. There is nothing inherently cowardly about wanting to live.

You can also see that women were not the only victims of the massacre; four injured men are not exactly nobody. So the idea that the men were all castrated wusses who jumped out of the line of fire screaming like girls, simply doesn’t hold water. After that initial incident, Lepine, whose mental state was deteriorating fast, was a lot less discriminate about whom he shot.

But that’s not the only daft thing Steyn has to say. Unfortunately, there’s more. I’ll spare you most of the dreck (which you can read at the National Re-Pew if you really want) and just give you the very dregs of it:

I’d prefer to say that the default position is a terrible enervating passivity. Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.

Thus spake the courageous, ultramasculine amateur psychologist, hectoring the white male world in general and Canada in particular from the safety of his Barcalounger. Then he slathered on the hand lotion and had ano
ther go at Wee Willie Winkie.

Meanwhile, here are a few examples of the “terrible enervating passivity” of the Virginia Tech victims.

First, “Students Panicked and Then Held Off Gunman”:

Then, with gunshots ringing down the hall, Mr. O’Dell, who had been shot in the arm, and other students shut the classroom door and pushed themselves against it to prevent the gunman from getting back in.

A few minutes later, the gunman tried to force his way back inside the classroom, where Mr. Perkins was using his jacket and sweatshirt to stanch the wounds of bleeding students. Mr. Cho managed to open the door a crack, but the students pushed back hard enough to stop him.

"I sprinted on top of the desk to the door, because the aisle was clogged with people, and I used my foot as a wedge against the door," recalled Mr. O’Dell. "It was almost like you had to fight for your life. If you didn’t, you died."

Mr. Perkins said he was struck at how Mr. O’Dell managed to help hold back the gunman, given his injury.

"It was just amazing to me that he was still up and leaning against the door," he said. "Derek was able to hold him off while I was helping other people."

Then, “That Was the Desk I Chose to Die Under”:

One student, Zach Petkowicz, was near the lectern “cowering behind it,” he would later say, when he realized that the door was vulnerable. There was a heavy rectangular table in the class, and he and two other students pushed it against the door. No sooner had they fixed it in place than someone pushed hard from the outside. It was the gunman. He forced it open about six inches, but no farther. Petkowicz and his classmates pushed back, not letting up. The gunman fired two shots through the door. One hit the lectern and sent wood scraps and metal flying. Neither hit any of the students. They could hear a clip dropping, the distinct, awful sound of reloading. And, again, the gunman moved on.

[…]

Room 204, Professor Librescu’s class, seems to have been the gunman’s last stop on the second floor. The teacher and his dozen students had heard too much, though they had not seen anything yet. They had heard a girl’s piercing scream in the hallway. They had heard the pops and more pops. By the time the gunman reached the room, many of the students were on the window ledge. There was grass below, not concrete, and even some shrubs. The old professor was at the door, which would not lock, pushing against it, when the gunman pushed from the other side. Some of the students jumped, others prepared to jump until Librescu could hold the door no longer and the gunman forced his way inside.

Matt Webster, a 23-year-old engineering student from Smithfield, Va., was one of four students inside when the gunman appeared. “He was decked out like he was going to war,” Webster recalled. “Black vest, extra ammunition clips, everything.” Again, his look was blank, just a stare, no expression, as he started shooting. The first shot hit Librescu in the head, killing him. Webster ducked to the floor and tucked himself into a ball. He shut his eyes and listened as the gunman walked to the back of the classroom. Two other students were huddled by the wall. He shot a girl, and she cried out. Now the shooter was three feet away, pointing his gun right at Webster.

And just for shits ‘n’ giggles, get a load of the terrible, enervating passivity in this story:

He learned the rest of the story yesterday morning in a conference and counseling session for the employees of the school’s Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, who are mourning the death of Kevin Granata and one other professor, Liviu Librescu. There Slota, Puri and others were told that when the gunshots rang out on the second floor, Granata, a military veteran, was in his office on the third floor. He walked out and across the hall to a classroom, where 20 frightened students were wondering what to do. He directed them into his office, where he ushered them to safety — in close quarters but behind the locked doors. Then, aware that other students might be in danger on the second floor, he and another professor, Wally Grant, went downstairs to investigate, Slota said.

Cho spotted them and shot them both. Grant was wounded but survived; Granata was killed. If the students in the classroom had tried to run out, they would have confronted the killer, too, Slota said.

“All those in that class, they all made it,” Slota said. “They were locked up until the police came. [Granata] couldn’t sit around and do nothing. He had to help out, find out what was going on.”

My gosh, what a bunch of gutless wonders people on both sides of the world’s longest undefended border are when confronted by an antisocial wingnut bearing arms. It’s a wonder our terrible, enervating passivity hasn’t killed us all!

I wonder what Mark Steyn would have done. Having had the dubious pleasure of reading too many of his crackbrained frothings in Maclean’s, I suspect he’d have taken a leaf from Lepine’s book and blamed the feminists for rejecting this brave, manly gun nut, cutting off his balls, and turning him terrorist. Or maybe, at least in his own wet dreams, he’d have crowed over the blood of every dead male, pointing to the congealing red pools at his feet and bellowing “That’s the way you prove you’re a man, lads–you die, die, DIE!”

I suspect, though, that he’s really far more likely to be standing hushed and goggle-eyed in a pool of a different fluid altogether–clear, yellow, and running rapidly down his leg. It’s rather telling that he was completely silent on the little matter of the women who died–and survived–so bravely in Montreal.

But then, it’s only to be expected. After all, it’s very apparent that Steyn has Manhood Issues.

PS: Newshounds has another fine exemplar (with video!) of Steyn soaking his trousers over what he calls a “culture of passivity”. This “man” is a sick joke; he can’t be trusted to cite so much as a single straight fact. He even lied about Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Sniper, claiming a professor with a deer rifle shot back but the cops were useless. Actually, a handbook put out by the University of Texas press mentions that two cops killed Whitman, and makes no mention at all of a professor with a deer rifle. The Wikipedia entry on Whitman also makes no mention of a shooting professor, although it does state that a history professor called the police. Hmmm. I wonder if Steyn will man up and apologize for lying to FUX Snooze and its viewers, or if he’ll crawl back into his hidey-hole when confronted.