Had heard about this video, joint produced by DHS and the City of Houston, but hadn’t seen it until recently.
Overall, given the sheeple disposition of your average American, I think this video is useful. It helps train them on what to do when their weapons-free bubble (see the decal on the door at 0:59) is invaded by an armed intruder determined to kill…an intruder no doubt comforted by the promise of a lack of effective resistance from relatively defenseless victims.
Of course, this delicious irony, that an “active shooter” training video would be produced in a building that prohibited its occupants from bringing defensive weapons onto the premises, was likely lost on the producers of the video, and will just as likely breeze past the average viewer too. But no matter…the point was to condition these future victims–those who put all their trust in the authorities to keep them safe at all times from criminals with murderous intent–to run and hide and, if pressed, fight with folding chairs and fire extinguishers.
From a social context, I was mildly surprised to see the men in the video depicted not as overweight bumbling fools, as they are regularly portrayed in popular media, but as take-charge leaders whose clear thinking in a deadly crisis delivers their female colleagues and less brave male coworkers to safety. This is consistent with a cultural expectation that properly socialized men step up in times of crisis to lead, protect, and defend those around them. Not that there is anything wrong with that, mind you; I simply find it interesting that this expectation is reinforced in this video, while in the remaining 99% of the non-crisis time, men and masculinity are marginalized if not derided. Call it “fair-weather feminism”, a corollary to “lifeboat feminism“: a feminism that asserts equality with men, if not privilege above them, so long as things go well. However, when a disaster or emergency strikes, well, it seems that our culture expects to be able to “break glass in case of emergency” to release a man’s hidden, inner white knight to ride to the rescue of the women and lesser men in his midst.
Of course, we know that in practice this dissonant expectation isn’t always realistic. But I do wonder from where our culture expects to draw these white knights, if it doesn’t actively cultivate them outside of proportionally diminishing, still-somewhat-traditional sheepdog occupations like the military and emergency services?
Even more surprising to me was the video’s depiction of a few of the female colleagues reducing themselves into sacks of panicky jell-o when the shooting started. Frankly I was surprised that feminists that surely came into contact with this video during production didn’t have those unflattering depictions of formerly strong, independent women™ excised during editing. But then again, perhaps that’s just my vertical thinking causing me difficulties again. For it seems that fair-weather feminism, just like lifeboat feminism, sports the benefits of traditional, pre-women’s-lib benevolent sexism whilst preserving the advantages of the super-equality that modern feminism delivers to women. In other words, it was in feminism’s best interest to portray female coworkers, ruthless competitors otherwise, as leavened with generous sprinklings of damsels in distress, pour encourager les hommes.
Also interesting to me was that, while the video extolled the hard work of law enforcement and government to protect the population from criminals, the video’s narrator explicitly admitted that LEOs can’t be everywhere all the time. This, coupled with the shooter’s flagrant disregard for the “gun free zone” of the office building, makes the case for the Second Amendment better than the National Rifle Association or Gun Owners of America ever could. When seconds count, the police are but minutes away. And how many fewer victims would have died had just one employee carried a .45 concealed in his business suit?
About the author: EW is a well-trained monkey operating heavier-than-air machinery. His interests outside of being an opinionated rabble-rouser are hunting, working out, motorcycling, spending time with his family, and flying. He is a father to three, a husband to one, and is a sometime contributor here at Spearhead. More of his intolerable drivel is available at the blog The Elusive Wapiti.
