By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
The tragedy of the deaths and wounding of students and faculty of Umpqua Community College was without doubt a terrible event. We first and foremost must center our prayers and attention towards the victims and their families who have endured suffering and pain that we hope to never experience ourselves.
But if anything can be praised it is the police, emergency crews, and community members who took upon the risks and the responsibility to protect the victims and provide at least a measure of comfort to the survivors and those who did not make it. One person in particular truly caught my attention and I am sure everyone else as well. He is Chris Mintz, who undoubtedly saved several lives but as a result became one of the shooting victims himself.
His actions are truly heroic as you may certainly agree.
Chris Mintz was attending class at Umpqua Community College when he heard shots ring out in an adjacent room. Instead of running for safety, the ten year military veteran went toward the scene, directing people away from the danger. He found and walked toward the shooter, trying to prevent him from entering another classroom by blocking the doorway. He attempted to calm the shooter by talking to him and trying to buy time and life for the other students. Mintz certainly knew the great risk of facing this armed attacker alone and it did not go well for him.
Chris was hit multiple times from gunfire and went down. As the gunman walked toward him, Chris told his assailant that today was his son’s birthday. Showing no mercy his assailant shot him again.
In all Chris was shot seven times trying to protect others. Authorities credit Chris with delaying the shooter and in doing so likely saved numerous lives. Though exact details of the events are still in flux with reporting information, it is clear Chris Mintz’ actions were heroic and lifesaving.
Police arrived six minutes after the active shooter dispatch went out. Every second in distraction of the shooter helped law enforcement arrive and be able to more quickly confront the gunman, who then committed suicide.
A hospital spokesperson stated that Chris suffered hits to his hands, arms, back, stomach and both legs were broken. Despite this he is expected to recover but he will need extensive rehabilitation.
I cannot stress how brave his actions were and how inspiring his story can be for many.
His cousin sponsored a GoFundMe petition to help defray the costs of his medical bills. Social media took hold and contributions from seventeen thousand donors rapidly poured in. Initially ten thousand dollars was requested in the fund drive, but in the first twenty two hours over half a million dollars poured in from grateful citizens. It is certainly enlightening.
I have to stress that Chris Metz was not the only victim and that others suffered as much or worse as lives were tragically lost. Other victims now have similar pages started but have not yet garnered such large donations. Those also deserve contributions as well. Since it is only the beginning of such things I will at a later time attempt to compile a list of other victims’ pages or sources where funds may be directed in their direction.
UPDATE:Officials announced the shooter committed suicide during the shout-out with police.
By Darren Smith
Sources:
CNN
Chris Mintz GoFundMe Page
Northwest Cable News
The views expressed in this posting are the author’s alone and not those of the blog, the host, or other weekend bloggers. As an open forum, weekend bloggers post independently without pre-approval or review. Content and any displays or art are solely their decision and responsibility.
I don’t adhere to any notion of unlimited personal “freedom.” To me that is just licentiousness, not liberty. Communities can have rights in my notion, which is not where the current libertarian dogmas are headed, and the Republicans are caught in the trap of defending certain communitarian values even as they prattle endlessly about individual this and that.
In theory there can be legitimate and rational democratic laws on weapons. The average NRA member is not for legalizing possession of bombs for example. There is a good body of law on the Second Amendment. US v Miller is good law. Also I could even allow for a measure of federalism on the topic with some local variations, in honor of the Tenth Amendment. The whole matter is really one of prudence at the end of the day, that is the only point at which I really would agree with the gun controllers.
I put a lot of the misery in crime down to social atomization. People are taught that me me me is what it’s all about, and they lose track of their religion, ethnicity, local community, you name it. Identity is deliberately detached here from social belonging and attached to pecuniary and hedonistic objectives. THat’s just as materialistic as Marxism. There is no cure for that in America which has devoted itself to the worship of Mammon. Capitalism was at the core of the war of independence, and the materialism of the Founders is just as obvious at times, when it came to their negation of English traditions. Conservatives don’t want to talk about that. I am something like a pre-French revolution conservative more than anything. I am interested in De Maistre if that tells you anything. But I am just a peaceful anonymous nobody on the internet, it doesn’t really matter what I Think anyways.
John Smith, just to be clear, I’m not Jewish. That was a play on the SJW nonsense. I’m a Presbyterian.
There is a strong Catholic element among Birchers. I would not presume to know the makeup, precisely. However, they have some faults and some merits. I am not a Bircher and my views would be unacceptable to them because I am too liberal on economic matters and not a capitalist lickspittle, and at the same time I want to talk about Jewish influence, in a respectful way, but they have a fatwa on that topic and put it all down to Zionism, which I find intellectually dishonest.
As for the Pope, I applaud him for talking about the evils of interest and debt slavery, most of all, which topics have always been a concern for Catholics, and to be fair were considered social evils by the ancient pagan Greeks and the Hebrews and even as far back as the Babylonians, too. Nobody else mentions “usury” these days much anymore, we have our own Supreme Court to thank for nullifying state restrictions on it back in the 70s when the bankers crushed interstate impediments to their lending.
John Birchers tend to be mostly Protestant.
John Smith, traditionally Catholics have always been advocates for social justice, which this Pope seems to be embracing whole heartedly.
“The only “argument” made by the left is the political technique of the assignment of stigma to a view“,
Viz. Annie.
“Disgusted”, “authoritarian”, etc.
That is, irrational.
Social justice in Roman Catholic thinking, operates in a hierarchy of values that are primarily spiritual, it respects free will, and also takes into account the material factors of life that are beyond any one person’s control, and does so with charity towards the poor. Marxism as a philosophical system is fundamentally materialist, it tried to develop a system of social justice based on a negation of free will and hostility towards all those who were not poor. Marxism from an economic perspective, however, is more valuable in its insights than “cultural Marxism,” which is just anti-Western garbage and belongs in the dungheap of history.
http://www.salon.com/2015/09/27/it_is_time_to_get_very_afraid_extremists_authoritarians_now_run_the_gop_and_no_one_can_stop_them/
“McCarthy began the process of creating an enemy that Movement Conservative followers could hate. His outrageous accusations divided American citizens into good and evil. Buckley and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, expanded this theme, dividing Americans into “Conservatives” like McCarthy and themselves, who were trying to save the nation, and “Liberals” who wanted to destroy it. Their Liberals were all those who endorsed the New Deal consensus. Although New Deal supporters made up the vast majority of Americans, Buckley and Bozell announced that these traitors must be purged from the country. Instead, the nation must return to its glory days with a new “orthodoxy” of strict individualism and Christianity. Bipartisanship, progressivism and national unity were all a dangerous assault on what they claimed were America’s traditional values.
In the 1960s, Movement Conservatives created a cast of villains. The Brown v. Board decision in 1954 and President Eisenhower’s use of troops to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957 enabled Movement Conservatives to resurrect old white fears that government activism was simply a way to funnel white tax dollars to African-Americans. Black people threatened America by forcing the government to redistribute wealth, thus inserting communism into the very fabric of the country. In 1968, Nixon made this Movement Conservative argument part of the established Republican Party when he resorted to the Southern Strategy. He expanded the villains’ list, too: he added to it grasping women, all minorities, and anti-war activists in the streets. They were all trying to destroy America.
Nixon’s people were purposely vague in their accusations—the administration’s favorite straw man was the murky “they” of “they say.” That unspecified “they” allowed Nixon’s people to preserve the illusion that they were describing facts. But President Ronald Reagan unhinged the rhetoric of Movement Conservatism even further from reality. He told folksy stories about Welfare Queens who stole tax dollars and hardworking individuals threatened by “a little intellectual elite in a far-distant Capitol.” When journalists fact-checked Reagan, he accused them of bias and rallied supporters against the “Liberal media.” And it played. In 1987, his administration ended the Fairness Doctrine that had required media to present facts and a wide range of opinions. This enabled Movement Conservatives to spew their worldview on talk radio and later television, railing against lazy blacks, women, minorities, workers and “Liberals,” all of whom were destroying America and holding the country back from regaining its former glory. And the more Movement Conservatives attacked, the more they weakened their enemies, and the more they despised them. Just as Hoffer had predicted.
By the time of the George W. Bush administration, Movement Conservatives controlled the Republican Party, and they abandoned reality in favor of their simple story line. A member of the Bush administration famously noted to journalist Ron Suskind that “the reality-based” view of the world was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” this senior adviser to the president told Suskind. “When we act, we create our own reality.”
That is exactly what today’s Movement Conservatives are doing. After the last Republican debate, astonished observers noted that many of the candidates’ assertions were flat-out lies. The New York Times editorial board mused: “It felt at times as if the speakers were no longer living in a fact-based world.” But the lies are not random. They tell followers that America has fallen apart because enemies— minorities, women and liberals– have poisoned the government. Only a Movement Conservative leader can purge the nation of that poison and return America to its former greatness. Donald Trump, who currently commands a significant lead, is the salesman who puts it most clearly. He tells his followers that “the world is a mess.” He promises to work outside the old order and replace it with something new and wonderful. He tells them a story in which Christianity is under siege, President Obama is a foreigner, and that immigrants—who actually commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans– are criminals. He refused to contradict a follower who announced that Muslims are a problem that we must “get rid of.” And he promises to “Make America Great Again.
The fantasy world of Movement Conservatives is no longer fringe talk. The leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination embrace it. They are playing to a chorus of true believers, and they are preaching what that choir wants to hear. They are following the same pattern Eric Hoffer identified as the path to authoritarianism. Last week, 43 percent of Republicans polled said they could imagine a scenario in which they would back a military coup. This week, Movement Conservatives in Congress knocked off a conservative speaker because he refused to sacrifice the American government to their demands.
John, I don’t think social justice and free will are compatible or reconcilable concepts.
They negate each other.
SJWs Always Lie
It refers to social justice warriors.
There is no point in engaging them in a dialectic (rational disussion), because they cannot engage anything but the emotional/rhetorical.
Either that, or they simply lie.
They always lie.
I just looked it up and SJW means social justice warrior. I am not aware of the usage, but I agree that social justice is desirable. I honor the ideals of Roman Catholic social justice. I also believe in just war theory and the right of individual self defense.
I also respect the metaphor of seeking social justice as a war, a war against evil, or a crusade, to use a maligned word. Unfortunately, we are such a diverse country that we don’t agree on much of anything. I would hope however that the leftists would give credence to free will as a primary factor in crime and punishment, however, and I content a liberal regime of individual rights must accept that as a premise or it falls of its own contradictions into something far worse.
Sorry, Ma’am, I am a goy and I respect the endogamous practices of the Hebrews by avoiding all sexual contact with them. I don’t want to end up like all the tribe that tried to mix with them, exterminated in as the OT tells of Amalek.
And although the many advocates of gun control are Jewish, I observe that many prominent Second Amendment scholars are also Jewish. And the Israeli people, unlike their less virile cousins in NYC, are clear on the benefits of an armed population, to their credit, and whatever their other faults may be.
I accept that a lot of gun control advocates are sincere and reasonable persons. I know this from experience, but as a group there is a lot of tearjerking appeals which prey on fears of bad men. In the end the only way to stop bad men is with good men.
John, it means Sexy Jewish Women.
Ms Annie, I have kids and they indeed may be in the line of fire someday, but more likely from criminals than anybody. To be frank, statistically more likely from black men like the shooter, than anybody. As for the white murderers out there, and there are plenty, they deserve lethal force to stop them as well.
My kids idea of gun control is mine, and that is, when in fear of one’s live or that of another, to calmly “aim center mass and squeeze”
PS what is a SJW? I don’t even know what that means.
I like much of your post, John.
I disagree, however, because ‘disgust’ is here used a a SJW trope to preclude or forbid rational discussion, a form of moral preening and virtue signaling.
It’s disingenuous and mendacious.
What’s irrational is the gun culture in this country. It’s irrational to think that one day it couldn’t be your own child that will be in the line of fire. The world thinks our gun laws and reverence of guns are irrational, and they would be right.
I think disgust in either direction, is a legitimate emotion and an expression of sincerity. I simply believe that those who blame these atrocities in the instrumentalities are failing to appreciate the indispensable factor of free will in crime and punishment.
Since many of them are cultural Marxists, who don’t believe in free will, that is not surprising. However, concepts of ordered liberty require it. Will America remain one that honors free will as a cultural premise, or will we succumb to the deconstructionism that has lead us to increasing political correctness and incipient totalitarianism?
That is serious business
Your disgust is either irrational or meant to serve as an emotional trump card precluding debate.
Either way, making you unfit for rational discourse.
We have to discuss gun rights and relevant facts, because the anti-gun people always dance in the blood of mass murders. Killeen Texas, many years ago, is one that jumps to mind. It is disgusting that the gun grabbers exploit these tragedies and we have to keep vigilant, ever the price of freedom.
Si vis pacem…
Discussing gun minutiae in this thread is disgusting, considering the subject matter of this blogpost. It’s disrespectful to this particular victim and the victims of this mass shooting. Again, hysteria has absolutely nothing to do with it. One need not be hysterical to be disgusted.