The Pessimist

That Winnipeg bus incident was a real shocker. What a nasty way to wake up. My sympathy goes out to the victim’s friends and family, and I hope that Mr. Vince Weiguang Li spends the rest of his life in prison.

There’s a lot of commentary already in the blogosphere about this incident. Comments like Canadians are wussies. Why didn’t anybody take this guy out? I’ll never visit Canada again. I’ll never take a bus again.

I’ve commented before on tragedies of this sort (Virginia Tech). I don’t think I can fault the people on the bus for basically running away. Unlike an airplane, a bus can quickly stop and you can bug out. On a plane, you’re basically stuck there and the situation will likely get worse, so the passengers would be expected – post 9/11 – to overwhelm the bad guy. But how do you go about disarming a mad man on a bus. The space is very crowded, it wouldn’t be easy to mount a multi-person defense. Unlike a classroom or office space where a madman could be surrounded and jumped, a bus would be a single file line up to a serial stabbing. The victim was a goner by the time the slumbering bus passengers were aroused. He couldn’t be helped. I do believe the right action was taken. Just get out. Like when a crocodile leaps out of the drinking hole to take a wildebeest, the rest of the herd is best to just run away.

The other comments are an exaggeration in the other direction. Nothing like this has ever happened in Canada before, or on a bus anywhere in North America. Your life is no more endangered today than it was yesterday. This event was totally without precedent, and there is no reason to believe it was anything other than an isolated incident.

But I’m sure, again, that Muslims across Canada breathed easier this morning … praise be to allah that the crazy man was not a muslim, but a crazy Chinese guy.