USA Today

GOP presidential aspirant Ben Carson came in for some harsh criticism after speculating that if he’d been at Umpqua Community College, he would have led a charge to stop the shooter. He stood accused of insensitivity for supposedly “second-guessing” the victims and for arrogance in his hypothetical claim to bravery. Fair enough: It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Carson, just like the rest of us, doesn’t really know what he would do in such a situation, never having faced one just like it.

But we do know what Chris Mintz did that day in Oregon: He reversed course from the direction of safety and headed back toward the gunman, pulling an alarm and showing people how to get away safety, before being shot seven times while trying to prevent the gunman from entering a classroom.

Mintz was a true hero that day — as were three Americans and a Brit who leapt up to subdue a gunman on a train bound for Paris in August, saving countless lives. The same goes for the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11 when they decided to try to take the plane back from the hijackers. So were the four gallant men no older than 27 who died shielding their girlfriends from the shooter in the Aurora, Colo., movie theater attack in 2012.

This is extraordinary conduct in the face of danger. And if we can pull off our partisan blinkers for a moment, let us acknowledge that Carson is right that we would be better off with more rather than less of it when extreme circumstances arise.

How exactly one goes about encouraging or promoting heroic conduct of the life-risking kind is a far more difficult question.

Many of the heroes I have mentioned here have a military background. It’s possible that their training played into their quick response to danger. It’s also possible, however, that it’s the other way around — that the interior spark of a heroic heart is what led them to volunteer for military service in the first place. In either case, they are demonstrably good people to have around in a pinch.

We can and should recognize heroic conduct when it occurs. President Reagan was right to take the occasion of his 1982 State of the Union address to introduce Americans to Lenny Skutnik, the government file clerk who two weeks before had stopped his car to jump into the icy Potomac River and help a woman who had survived a plane crash reach a lifeline to a helicopter.

It seems unlikely that any of the life-saving heroes who come our way took action in expectation of winning prizes and glory. But retelling their stories just might inspire others to emulate them in extremis.

One thing we could certainly do to encourage heroism is to quit punishing it. Take the case of Cody Pines, a junior at Huntington Beach High School in California. A video went this month showing him stopping a schoolyard attack on a younger blind kid by decking the assailant. One punch from Pines put him on the ground.

The school, with its policy of zero tolerance for violence, initially appeared prepared to suspend Pines for his actions. On a somewhat smaller scale, it would be as if French President Francois Hollande had decide to order the arrest of the three Americans from the train on human rights abuse and assault charges — rather than awarding them the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration, as Hollande actually did.

Days later, the school district announced that it had no intention to take disciplinary action against Pines — thanks perhaps to the widespread outrage at the idea and the swift accumulation of more than 80,000 signatures on an on-line petition urging the school not to suspend Pines.

It would be socially desirable — and it might even save a few lives down the line — if school districts around the country decided to teach the virtue of courage in the face of danger by studying examples of the heroic actions of seemingly ordinary people. And if this is too much to ask, then it’s up to the rest of us to demand that they at least refrain from punishing somebody with the guts to stick up for a kid getting picked on in the schoolyard.

Ben Carson put it clumsily, but he’s right that we could use more heroes.