Comments

1
Antoinette Tuff is my hero.
2
@1 What you said. Reading the article I think she fits the true definition of a hero. She put her own life on the line and the day ended without anybody being killed.
3
I have a new spelling for Tuff Love...
4
A horrible woman who ruined the orgasms of gun fetishists everywhere.
5
I listened to her entire interview with Anderson Cooper last night, often with tears in my eyes. She is a truly awesome person, in every sense of the word.

We haven't heard anything from the NRA, re what would've happened had another person been in her situation, someone armed with a firearm. Death and/or gruesome injury to one or more people would've been the result.

I'm so glad it was an unarmed Antoinette Tuff in that chair.
6
Beautiful.
7
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun... er, or a woman with a calm voice.

Well done, Antoinette Tuff.
8
@4- I read a whole lot of denials of her role in stopping a tragedy from gun nuts. It doesn't fit their narrative, it must not have happened.
9
Sure, she's a beautiful human being, but man she's just plain beautiful.

...and she was married for 33 years?
10

This was truly staggering, breathingtaking stuff. How many of us would have the nerve to calmly encounter, and calmly and even lovingly head off yet another man with a gun at a school? How many of us could successfully fight the primal urge - for several minutes - to run literally for our lives? This woman is fucking superhuman, and I think at the very least should be honored at the White House and giving a fucking medal.

11
Ditto @10. The woman deserves the Congressional Medal of Honor. If that wasn't heroism in combat nothing else meets the definition. And she was only armed with a good heart and a quick mind.
12
@10 Antoinette Tuff is special, not by her not running away, but by the empathy she was able to give to that guy.

I know of another example of a teacher who stayed with her pupils while they had been taken hostage by a madman - and who talked him into releasing them by small groups, although it's not clear if he would really have killed them : (only in French, alas)

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prise_d%27o…

Most of the school staff can and do fight the primal urge to run, everytime such tragedies happen. Kids are not left alone to fend for themselves. Staff protect them, and die with them as a result.

Most school staff don't run because there is a much stronger primal urge awoken there, that to protect our youngs from harm at all costs. You don't spend years feeling responsible for whatever happens in your classroom or in your library, to stop feeling responsible the second you see a gun.

Which makes it all the more horrible how teachers' unions are treated.
13
"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is..."

Nothing.

There is no one solution, no cookie-cutter method of preventing violence all the time. The "all guns all the time" crowd is out in force right now, blathering on about how this doesn't matter because what Antoinette Tuff did wouldn't have worked in every situation (as though returning fire would have). It illustrates how they think pretty clearly; the high risk of failure (and even further aggravation of the problem) when ordinary people attempt to fight gunfire with gunfire is ignored in favor of a narrative that claims that owning and carrying a gun, and being ready to kill another human being at a moment's notice, is not only a one-way ticket to safetytown, but the ONLY way to get there. Which is of course, if you know anything about conflict resolution OR the nature of combat, a patent absurdity. But, that's the narrative, and the folks who cling to it will go in insisting that any other method of resolving conflicts is tenuous and unreliable at best. Ultimately, of course, that's why this story is attracting so much negative attention from that crowd; they love to harp on about their eternal question, "how often do good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns and we don't hear about it in the media?" Stories like this, much to their dismay, get folks asking the opposite question; "how often do people WITHOUT guns stop people with guns and we don't hear about it?" We can never know the answer, of course, because acts of violence that never happen don't get reported. It's an important part of changing our national narrative about gun violence, though.
14
@9,

Yes she's gorgeous and very youthful looking for someone who was married for 33 years. She's already received a phone call from President Obama so I hope that a White House invite is next.

Please wait...

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