“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
1996 - When Charles Carl Roberts IV hung up on the police dispatcher, the police negotiator outside the Amish schoolhouse frantically redialed Roberts’ cell phone number but could not get through. Roberts, likely feeling that the police were coming at any moment, readied himself to begin shooting the girls.
That was when it happened — a miracle. Not the kind that changed one thing in that schoolhouse, but one that affected the millions of us outside the school house. 13-year-old Marian Fisher raised her voice. “Shoot me first and leave the other ones loose,” she reportedly said.
Her 11-year-old sister, Barbie, then said, “"Shoot me next.”
“Shoot me first.” Imagine saying those words. Now listen to them again in your mind. Then imagine them being said by a child.
Marian Fisher and her sister Barbie must have known the police were coming from Roberts’ frantic phone calls and they may have believed that if they offered themselves perhaps he wouldn’t have had time to kill the others. This was a moment that we should all measure ourselves against.
Roberts looked strangely at the girls and he asked them to pray for him just before he opened fire.
2012 - Victoria Soto, 27, a first-grade teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., moved her students into a closet, and placed her body between them and shooter Adam Lanza.
She was found huddled over her students, protecting them.
2007 - A 76-year-old aeronautics professor, a Holocaust survivor who had escaped Nazis, had been hunted by communists in Romania, and who finally moved to America to work as a professor at Virgina Tech, was shot as he shielded the classroom door while his students safely escaped a crazed gunman.
Everyone who knew him described Liviu Librescu as kind, generous, and committed to his students. And when the shots rang out on the campus of Virginia Tech, he blocked the door with his body and ordered the students to flee out the window.
One grateful student said she remembered looking back just before leaping from the window and seeing the old man at the door. She said, "I don't think I would be here if it wasn't for him."
1999 - When the gunmen started firing outside Columbine High School, teacher and coach Dave Sander ran through the cafeteria trying to get children to safety. He, along with two janitors, helped get more than 100 students out of the path of danger by herding them away from the shooters.
So successful was Sanders that by the time Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold arrived, the cafeteria was nearly empty. And Sanders had by then run upstairs and was hiding students in classrooms when he was shot in the back.
His last words were reportedly, "Tell my family I love them."
We must mourn what happened in Connecticut just a few days ago and what has happened all too often in recent years. We should all be horrified. We should, I believe, be worried that something is wrong, very wrong, in our country today where mass shootings of children have so quickly become the new normal. But please please also acknowledge the light. To ignore it, is to give one final victory to darkness. Please thank God for such heroes as these and many more. And pray for a day where such heroism is no longer necessary.
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Thank you. There are tears in my eyes right now. I needed to hear this today.
Thank you for this. As a mom of 5 small children, I do want to see the bright spot in all of this. But I wish there wasn’t such evil that we had to search amongst for light. I know that evil has always existed, but in this information age we are bombarded with evil from all parts of the earth. Yes, there are the big events, like what just happened in CT (and all the other ones you mentioned) but it seems like you can’t go on any media site without reading about some horrendous crime committed somewhere. And many seem to involve children. It makes my heart ache.
I believe we could all save lives by choosing to live without keeping arsenals of weapons intended for nothing other than killing human beings as quickly and efficiently as possible. These legal weapons too often have been used by irresponsible people who did not have to bother buying them—they were easy to take. The examples of self-sacrifice cited in the article show great bravery and compassion for others. Can’t we be brave and compassionate enough to live in our homes without semi-automatic weapons to protect us from highly unlikely incidents of invasion?
Am I the only one who thinks that these things might be happening because we do not pray enough, we do not fast enough and we definitely don’t go to confession enough!
Yes there are parts of the world where there is not as much violence (but then again there are parts where there are far more), but I can’t help but wonder if they are merely in the calm before their own storm.
all one needs to do is walk to their bathroom and take a good hard look in the mirror..and you pro-choice catholics taken an even longer harder look into that mirror and hear the screams of the child in the womb being MURDERED in the womb..we are the cause of evil because we fail to adhere to the teachings of the Church
Don’t forget the young men who died shielding their girlfriends during the Aurora Colorado movie theater shooting.
Beautiful, Mr Archbold. Beautiful
If these heroes had guns then the endings would have been happier.
@cowalker: You are aware that wide availability of guns is linked to massive REDUCTIONS of the crime rate? The UK has between 3 and 8 times the US rates of every violent crime…and the Home Office’s stats don’t count victims under 16. Whereas gun control has only reduced violent crime in one country—Japan—and there, the police openly flout their constitution in order to get the verdict they want, the prisons are compared to Buddhism’s version of Hell for a REASON, and the organized crime began as vigilantes and will still annihilate people who make trouble in their neighborhoods.
We have vets unemployed…including snipers. Hire one for every school as the resident protector. You can reduce pistol clips to ten rounds and a mass murderer will simply bring twenty clips with him in a photographer’s vest. We are not going to actually fund the mental health problem simultneously with budget cuts of one trillion. Hire a vet in each school as a designated protector. We’re not going to spend on mental health. We should…we’re not. Changing clip capacities has no effect at all. Put a vet in every school with a vest, swat shield, good weapons. After three weeks, the media will be on other things…funds will remain frozen. A vet in every school. Take the gambling out of the equation.
Bill, you are right on target! The Israelis did this -and armed teachers-and the attacks on schools stopped.
Every school principal should be required to learn how to use a gun which is kept in a highly guarded locked case, requiring two people to open it. The vault should contain a bullet proof vest and riot helmet.
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So long as we regularly dismember, burn and mutilate children in their mother’s wombs, we won’t be seeing a return to reverence for life.
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When women value being mothers over driving a Lexus and living in a white collar neighborhood, we’ll see a change.
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When children before the age of three aren’t sacrificed to indifferent caregivers who prop bottles in their mouths so their Mom’s can feel powerful at their jobs, we’ll see mental health in children improve.
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When fathers and mothers stop devastating their children by abandoning their spouses in pursuit of the pleasure paradigm, we’ll see our country become healthy again.
@ Anna Lisa you must be one of these very wealthy women who has had the luxury of never having to work a day in her life and was able to stay at home with her kids. I grew up in a home like that but times have changed and many women, through no fault of their own, have been abandoned by their husbands and have to go out and work for a living in order to feed their children and buy them the bare essentials to exist on. I work with single parents who DEFINITELY do not drive a Lexus or live in white collar neighborhoods and yes, they are wonderful mothers and fathers who have raised wonderful children. Somehow I believe by your post that you live in an ivory tower and look down on people who have to work for a living. Lucky you, that you have sooooo much money that you can judge other people.
Ceci, notice that I referred to the ones who trade raising their infants for driving a Lexus. There’s a huge difference between them and abandoned single mothers or critical breadwinners. I’ve seen my fair share of children being raised by nannies. I’ve also seen my fair share of neurotic children trying to cope with a latch key life. Yes,I lived in one of the wealthiest suburbs of the nation, but there was no ivory tower in sight. We scraped by so I could stay home, live in a tiny house with a huge mortgage, and take care of my eight kids with no outside help. Trust me that I know what I’m talking about. The suicide rate in that county is nearly twice the state average, and the alcohol consumption for these kids is the highest in the nation as well. You’re barking up the wrong tree.
Please accept my apologies Anna. The nearest I got to wealth was going to Catholic School with a lot of wealthy kids who were being raised by nannies. I come from a middle class upbringing where my mom was a stay at home mom way back in the 50’s and 60’s. I would have loved to be a stay at home mom with my daughter but my husband became disabled and I had to go to work, went to school to get my RN so that I could give my family a decent life. Unfortunately with the cost of living these days, both parents have to work just to make ends meet and it’s sad that some kids come home from school to an empty house which leaves them without supervision and they can get into all sorts of mischief. The family has always been the for a civilization and it’s too bad that family values just don’t matter any more and of course people have turned away from God so the only thing we can do is pray, pray for our country and for the families of those children in Newtown, CT who were murdered. God still loves us.
Ceci, whenever I have been in the hospital (about every three years for the last 25) I am in awe of the RNs who have families, and practice such a noble profession at the same time. Difficult times can bring out the best in all of us. I am sure that families that pull together, and don’t bail out when the going gets tough, teach a beautiful lesson to their children that no words or catechism lesson could ever convey. How tragic that this was not the case for the poor Lanza family in Conneticut, and the ripple effect on every innocent family that was pulled down with them. I pray that they are comforted by all of us who are grieving with them in solidarity.
Thanks, Matt. This was one of the few things I’ve read about the tragedy that was actually worth reading - that actually changed something in the way I thought about it.
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