Words to live by

Mark Steyn has another excellent essay up, regarding the murder of Anna Lindh, the Swedish foreign minister. While he is shocked by her murder, what really gets to him is that despite the sheer numbers of people standing around, nobody did anything. Nobody stopped the man as he calmly walked out of the crowded department store. Why?

There seem to have been an awful lot of bystanders to Lindh's stabbing -- in broad daylight, in a crowded Stockholm department store, after being pursued by her assailant up an escalator. Granted that most of the people bystanding around were women, it still seems odd -- at least from this side of the Atlantic -- that no one attempted to intervene or halt the blood-drenched killer as he calmly left the store.

Nobody. Did. A. Thing. I can't comprehend that. How can you just stand there as a murderer walks by? How can you even let this sort of thing happen? SHE WAS BEING PURSUED UP AN ESCALATOR AND NOBODY STEPPED IN TO HELP!

This isn't an argument for guns, though inevitably Sweden has gun control, knife control and everything else. It's more basic than that: It's about the will to be a citizen, not just a suckler of the nanny-state narcotic.

When you expect the government to do everything, the inevitable result is that you do nothing. And this is what scares me.