Liberals, Not Conservatives, Are the Ones With the Courage to Take on an Active Shooter

When the police run and hide, the teachers always stand and fight

Republicans make a lot of noise but they’re all bark and no bite when it comes to protecting children

Years ago I was in the middle of a very challenging seven-day hike with two Olympic athletes. We were in the Andes crossing mountain passes at about 15,000 feet of elevation.

One morning as we were preparing for yet another grueling twenty-mile hike, the tour leader came over to me and said, “When I put together a commercial expedition, I have to interview all the participants to make sure I’m confident they can make it.”

“You never interviewed me,” I replied.

“I wasn’t worried about you,” he said. “You’re a marathon runner. But more than that, you’ve got the right personality.”

“What personality is that?”

“You make jokes, you don’t let things get you down, you stay positive. You’re not constantly bragging about how tough you are. Those are the truly tough people who can actually do things in life.”

I was flattered by this naturally, but the comment also made me curious.

“What are the people who can’t make it like?”

“That’s easy,” he said. “It’s the faux military types. Not the ones that actually served, those guys are fine. The ones that break are those guys who act as they’ve gone to the military, but who have been civilians their whole lives. You know ‘the good guy with a gun’ types. The kind of guys that wear ‘The Punisher’ shirts. They’re all weak cowards in my opinion.”

“What happens when you have one of those guys along?”

“They burst into tears. Once we even had to go back. He ruined the trip for everyone. He just refused to man up and do what needed to be done.”

Cowardice disguised by bluster

I’ve written a lot of articles about toxic masculinity. I’m so darn tired of these guys.

All my life I’ve been surrounded by these obnoxious cowboy types who will sit in a bar and bleat about how tough they are. They talk about their past fights. They talk about how nobody can ‘take them.’ I wish they’d all just shut up.

The problem with them is that all the noise of being a bully tends to captivate the attention of the general population.

Donald Trump is a good example. He’s a weak bully who says stupid stuff like this:

US President Donald Trump has said he would have run in to the Florida high school where 17 people were shot dead this month even if he was not armed.

“I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon,” Mr Trump told a group of state governors gathered at the White House — Florida school shooting: Trump says ‘I would have run in unarmed’

Lies are entirely how Trump operates and his lies are effective. After making an idiotic statement like this, the whole world is left with this fake image of Trump rushing into a building to confront a shooter. The fact is, he hasn’t done it and I don’t believe he ever would do it.

We actually have evidence of the type of people who confront shooters unarmed. Those people are liberal teachers. They’re the ones who use their bodies as a shield to protect their children.

It’s the liberals, not the conservatives.

The liberals are the brave ones, not the cowards huddling out in the parking lot with their guns and their Punisher logos.

Ms Garcia — a married mother of four who taught at Robb Elementary for 23 years — was a “sweet, kind, loving” teacher who considered her students to be family, her relatives said.

“She passed away with children in her arms trying to protect them,” her nephew, John Martinez, wrote on Twitter.

“Those weren’t just her students. They were her kids as well.” — Uvalde teachers killed protecting students in Texas mass shooting, as Governor reveals gunman’s earlier social media comments

Immediately after a mass murder where American children are slaughtered, conservatives try to politicize the tragedy and use it as an opportunity to show how tough they are. We get all these images of men in body armor with weapons at their hip stomping around after the fact. That’s what the general public has to watch on a 24/7 news cycle.

That’s supposed to make us feel safe? They’re doing nothing!

We never get to see the images of brave liberal teachers, wearing summer dresses, gathering up the students they love as their own, and desperately trying to fend off death with their own flesh.

We never see that.

And, as a result, the ignorant American public believes the lie that Conservatives are willing to protect children. It’s disgusting. At the very least, we should take a moment to honor the kind and brave women and men who, even unarmed, are willing to confront mass shooters without even thinking about it.

The American public needs to know what the true face of bravery looks like. It’s not the guy in shades and body armor.

The conservative response is to stop decent people from saving lives

Liberals tend to gravitate towards professions like teaching.

Conservatives tend to gravitate towards law enforcement.

What do the conservatives do when an active shooter is slaughtering children? They stand in a parking lot brandishing tasers at distraught parents.

The more details that emerge about how police responded to the massacre in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, the clearer it is that the already well-funded, heavily armed and amply trained law enforcement officers on the scene failed to save the lives of 19 children and two of their teachers.

Here’s what we know so far, based on haunting videos from the scene outside Robb Elementary School and statements from police officials themselves. Salvador Ramos murdered 21 people. Despite earlier, misleading claims from law enforcement officials, it appears that no police officers engaged with the shooter before he entered the school. Instead of rushing in to protect the children and staff when reports of a gunman approaching the school were made at 11:30 a.m., police instead waited outside and aggressively confronted parents who were begging them to enter. The parents were threatened with arrest — one cop brandished a Taser — as they attempted to access the school to save their kids themselves — Natasha Lennard

“Aggressively confronted parents.” That’s the conservative way.

One of the things that really frustrates me about police is that they don’t even have the stones to say they’d prefer that criminals didn’t have access to AR-15s.

Clearly, police are scared of those weapons. You’d be insane to not be scared of those weapons. Why don’t members of police forces speak up and ask for common-sense gun control? It would save police lives.

This solution of conservatives hiding in the parking lot and using their weapons to halt brave liberals from rushing in to protect children is unacceptable.

Conservatives claim to be waiting for a fight, liberals would prefer to avoid one

I don’t trust anyone who espouses conservative philosophy to ever do the right thing in an emergency situation. Experience has taught me that these people are braggarts who refuse to stand beside you when the chips are down.

Conservatives love to act tough, but it takes a whole lot more strength to tell the truth about what’s happening in the United States. Conservatives prefer to regurgitate the same old lie about “American Exceptionalism.”

“Let’s just pretend the whole history of the US was wonderful so we don’t upset our kids!”

Tell them lies. That’s the conservative solution.

Our country isn’t exceptional, we can’t even send our children to school without being worried they’re all going to be shot by a deranged gunman.

The face of bravery is not some dude in body armor who has never spent a second in the armed forces.

The face of bravery is a middle-aged teacher in a summer dress who is quick to smile and just as quick to use her body as a human shield in a desperate effort to save the lives of the students she teaches whom she has come to love as her own.

America needs to learn which people are the frauds, and which people are deserving of honor and respect.

Conservatives are cowards. Don’t look to them for strength. Never look to them to lead. Instead, choose the side that values compassion over guns.