We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

The most remarkable thing about this, to me, is the refusal to think about the situation spatially, in terms of what the people in the classrooms could have done, before pontificating on what they should have done. The gunman only shot people in four classes – rooms 204, 206, 207, and 211, which are... presumably pretty close together. Think about how long it took to get out of your college classes after they ended. As a gunman, you would have no prerogative to actually enter the rooms, which were probably in a four-square kittycorner, the same distance from room to room as from inside the room to the door. It’s not like this is taking place in the wide-open town square of a Spaghetti Western. The shooter would stand in the doorway, this four-foot wide aperture, shooting at his leisure, dozens of times before he had to reload. Figure, he’d shoot the people closest to the door first. If he stopped to reload, and it was somehow the “responsibility” of the people in the classroom to “bum rush” him, they’d probably be at least fifteen feet away from him, and have to navigate the sea of desks and – my god – bodies between them and him. Then, when he moved on from the classroom, they would have a decision – to leave the room and try to get him in a wide open hall, wherein they are unarmed and he has two semi-automatic weapons, or do their best not to die in their classrooms, where he no longer is. How could there possibly have been opportunity for heroism? Apparently there were some people who did some amazing things, and that’s a testament to the people involved, so crassly defiled by these repub jerks. But let’s say somebody rushed him and got shot, and then another person rushed him and got shot, and then another person rushed him and got shot (which is the most likely scenario, if people tried to rush him). At what point do you say, “I’m not going to rush him”? I think you make that decision before the first person rushes him. I do. Maybe I get shot. But I didn’t get shot trying to subdue a man with two guns from fifteen feet away. How do you bumrush somebody in a bell tower? How do you even think about it?

It probably merits a mention that the New York Times didn't poll for the "most influential" book of the last 25 years. It was the "best" book, which is a very different question. If you asked young novelists for the "best" writer, you'd probably get a lot of Shakespeares, but not that many of them read like Cormac McCarthy. I'm not going to pretend to know if this directly reflects on DeLillo, but it's a bit casuistic to say the NYT picked Underworld as the 2nd most influential novel of the last 25 years, or Don DL as the most or 2nd most influential novelist. Anyway, you could probably get everything you get out of DeLillo, as a writer, from a slurry of Roth, Pynchon, and Updike, so the whole scenario matters very little. Which is not to diminish DeLillo, because I think he's wonderful, and I hope he's influential, even though I understand why a reader could want to hold hot coals to his toes. It just means, it's pretty hard to tell where these young guns are getting their silly/profound tragedy, or their purple/prosaic protagonists, or their icily glittering sentences. Who are we, Harold Bloom?

People are talking about how Duncan can't be suspended for coming out onto the court because there wasn't an altercation in process.

That don't make no sense.

From NBA.com: 'Stoudemire and Diaw have been suspended for leaving "the immediate vicinity of their bench" during an altercation.'

But they clearly didn't leave the bench during the altercation. They left the bench well before the altercation, after a hard foul (this smacks of something... oh, that's right. That's what Duncan did). If you watch the video, you see the hard foul, and then *bang*, there are the assistant coaches holding them back while Horry is still sulking insouciantly away with the trademark Spurs "I didn't do shit" look on his face. They left the bench, you could argue, with the intention of starting an an altercation, then thought better of it, and then had the bad fortune of their checked-in teammates Bell and Nash stepping to Horry. But they certainly did not leave the bench during an altercation.

If a confrontation had developed just after Duncan came out onto the floor, he would have been suspended. But an altercation did not develop, so he was not suspended. So if you're going strictly by the letter of the law, this is a pretty f'ing arbitrary rule, unless you're willing to interpret a little. Which they were, and then weren't. Good call.