When the shooter in Tuscon started his senseless rampage humans reacted as they always have. I imagine everyone was, to some extent, frozen, paralyzed by the utter impossibility of the moment, of the peaceful morning ending with the punctuation of shot after shot into mothers, daughters, fathers, and sons. People protected themselves, and protected loved ones. Some acted in ways completely at odds with their own survival.
When the shooter paused to reload, a 61 year old volunteer, Roger Salzgeber, hit the shooter in the back of the head with a folding chair. As the shooter teetered another man, retired Army Col Bill D. Badger bleeding from being shot in the head, grabbed his arm and the two men, with 135 years on this earth between them, pushed the shooter to the ground and pinned him to the pavement. Patricia Maisch found herself staring into the face of the gunman. When the shooting had started she threw herself down, choosing to not to run and attract the shooter. She regretted that decision when the woman next to her was shot. She remembers thinking, trying to imagine what that bullet would feel like. I can only imagine what she most have been feeling. I was in a car accident once where the vehicle was launched into the air, and I can remember so clearly the time from when the road noise disappeared to when the car hit the ground and began to roll. A horrible anticipation, the time stretching on, my mind scrambling, wondering what having my bones crushed as the car crumpled would feel like. That was just a fraction of the terror that Patricia Maisch went through, as she contemplated a bullet that would never come. The sound of the shooter hitting the ground caused her to look up. She saw his face, the gun in his right hand, and his left hand scrambling to load another 30 round magazine into the empty weapon. Had he been able been able to do so, the number of casualties may have soared. She wrestled with the gunman, and disarmed him, securing the magazine thereby preventing any more shooting.
While this was occurring, Daniel Hernandez, a 20 year old congressional intern who had been on the job for less than a week, moved toward the wounded to render aid. He was about 30-40 feet away when he heard the shooting, and he ran towards the gunfire, oblivious to the danger around him. He was driven to help, and with first aid training from high school courses in nursing and phlebotomy he knew what to do. He began taking checking the vital signs of the wounded and performing basic triage until he came upon the seriously wounded congresswoman. He gave her all his attention, propping her up to clear her airways, applying direct pressure to the wounds to try and stem the flow of blood, and keeping her awake, conscious, and communicating. His actions, along with a host of others, are credited as saving the congresswoman's life.
These people found themselves in an extraordinary situation and acted accordingly. I think we all wonder if we would have the courage, the selflessness, the determination to make the right choice in an awful situation.
In the moment i think people act, and more often than not people do the right thing. I struggle, though, with the idea that it seems the goodness, even greatness in people is only seen in response to some horrific example of man's propensity for hate, violence, cruelty, and destruction. Prior to the shooting, I was thinking about what the term humanity really meant. On one hand you have the definition that means collectively everyone in the human species, synonymous with people or mankind, and I'm fine with that. It was the other meaning that I couldn't understand, humanity meaning kindness or a basic level of goodness. I think people overall treat each other poorly, from wars and large scale atrocities to that rude person at the grocery store, so to say that humanity means benevolence seemed a bit self serving. When we say dog-like we don't mean really smart even if that represented the highest of canine ideals, but the actions of the killer, those listed above, and many more not mentioned put in stark contrast the difference between the actions of humanity and the quality of humanity. The killer, by brutally murdering other people to accomplish some internal goal, was participating in an unfortunately very human activity, one so endemic to people that it encompasses the entirety of our history, actually stretching back even further, deep into our prehistory, but the killer wasn't treating the people he killed like fellow humans, but rather like animals. The people who tackled the gunman and disarmed him, those who cared for the wounded, those people who ran towards the gunfire that morning were all exhibiting the best of qualities, not just goodness or kindness, but acknowledging a shared humanity. To treat someone else humanely is to act as if they were family, or a friend, to recognize that the similarities between us vastly out weight our differences, to see one another as equals and not just as extras in our own story. I have a better understanding now of what humanity really means, it doesn't mean acting like a human, cause after all what does that mean, humans kill each other all the time, but instead I feel that humanity is more about acting as if others are human. We are all so much more alike than different. We all live and die, and in between we suffer and celebrate, love and mourn; we sleep, eat, and excrete. The rest is just ornamental.
