You can be my Secretary of Imaginary Heroism
Donald Trump can be magnanimous when he wants to be, such as this tweeted defense of Ben Carson and his notion that if
he were in a mass shooting, he would
not let the shooter shoot him.
So, and good to know, we now have it from both Ben Carson and Donald Trump that when Ben Carson was imagining unleashing his own inner Couch Rambo on the mass shooter of the moment, he was not specifically saying that the people who did get shot were doing it wrong. They just didn't Couch Rambo fast enough.
There's an interesting exploration to be had in how the various would-be heroes of America's now-regular mass shootings think they, unlike all those other college students or theater patrons or elementary school kids, would Do It Better and thus save the day. We already know that having your own gun does little; if the killer(s) know you have a gun (say, because we're now arming our teachers as regular policy) that simply makes you the first target, and even if they do not it's highly likely that by the time you figure out what's going on and who to shoot the police will already be in close enough proximity to make that a very bad idea. We're told that if Couch Rambo was there, he would have tackled the shooter, but at each of these things victims attempt exactly that and even when you throw trained Army vets into the mix it seldom goes as well as Couch Rambo supposes it would have.
But it's integral to gun culture, this notion that if you had been facing a bad guy you and your gun or your finely honed Couch Rambo reflexes would have saved the day, as opposed to all the things that are tens of thousands of times more likely to happen, like accidentally shooting your neighbor or your child finding your gun and shooting someone else or you drunkenly putting a hole through your own leg during one of the seemingly countless times you have your weapon of self-defense in your lap in order to "clean" it again. None of those make for heroic stories, though, and so they don't count.