I love this interview with the student clerk who helped stop another school shooting in Georgia.
How did she do it? Did she pull out her own gun and shoot the guy? No, she talked to him. She told him about her own problems. She could see his humanity. Her experienced with her own disabled child helped her understand how this man was suffering. She told him to stay safe with her in the school, so the cops didn’t kill him. She found peace through her religion.
She is a true hero.
Apt. 11d 
I teared up telling my own family about it. Such a good, empathetic woman who has seen her share of troubles and reacted with love not hate. A true hero.
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Laura’s twitter quote from the pope put into action. With a lot of “heroism” I conclude that many of us would try to do the same. But hearing the 911 call made me think that she was extraordinary. In the final stages of the call, she’s offering herself as a shield to bring a peaceful end to the incident, asking for clarification, calmly. So thankful that her efforts succeeded in averting possible horror without anyone dying.
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Blessed are the peacemakers.
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I expect that the principal and the psychologist at Sandy Hook were trying to pull off something similar before Adam Lanza gunned them down.
It’s great that this woman pulled it off, but wannabe killers differ in their degrees of determination and cold-bloodedness.
If talk is all you’ve got, though, there’s no harm in trying. (For what it’s worth, Wikipedia says that the Norwegian shooter spared the lives of at least two people who begged for their lives.)
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Jennifer Hawke-Petit (the mother in the 2007 Connecticut home invasion murder case) believed that she was establishing rapport with the home invaders and that everything was going to be OK. She could not have been more mistaken. As it turned out, her decision to return back to her home with her captor after taking out money at the bank under duress may well have cost her her life and the lives of her daughters. Had she escaped (as she had a chance to), the home invaders might well have fled with the money. Or not. It was a very difficult choice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshire,_Connecticut,_home_invasion_murders
Hawke-Petit had no way at the time of knowing exactly how evil their intentions were, but that case does suggest the limitations of cooperation with people the degree of whose bad intentions we do not know.
I would very much discourage anybody from cooperating with an assailant if they have any other choices.
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That’s actually what makes her act one of heroism, because it did occur with risk. She attached value to the life of the assailant (as the 911 call makes clear) . It was a risk (but, any other choice would have been as well).
My guess is that the evidence that talk is statistically a worse risk than others is probably pretty weak, especially when you add the risk of killing someone who didn’t need to be killed (say someone killed mistakenly or accidentally or in the crossfire, Trayvon Martin or the Japanese student killed in Louisiana trick or treating or the kid who broke into the wrong house in Virginia or Reeva Steenkamp, or Damon Holbrook, or, . . . and we can make the list much longer with at least 116 children killed since ).
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/12/gun_death_tally_every_american_gun_death_since_newtown_sandy_hook_shooting.html
(And, I’d certainly look at a similar tally with links to the news articles on all the incidents that were stopped by someone using something other than talk to stop an armed assailant. My guess is most of those will be armed law enforcement, but it would be useful to see, an interesting project)
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