Following on the previous thought, a point needs to be emphasized: If you had the potential to affect what happens, then you have responsibility for what happens.

A woman is raped on a train, and the bystanders stand by, a few of them filming it. One calls 9-1-1. None dare intervene. “I’m not trained for this. I don’t have a gun or anything. What do you expect me to do?” The bystander makes the case that he is not responsible for what happened because he was not involved and, even if he had chosen to get involved, there is nothing he could have done except get himself hurt, because he possesses no capability to intervene effectively.

“I expect you to have been trained, to have had a gun.”

That bystander, if he is an adult, had years to prepare for that moment, physically and mentally. He had opportunities to train, to work out, to learn basic fighting skills, to arm himself and to train with his weapon. For years, he made a choice not to undertake any such preparation–to some extent for the very purpose, if subconsciously, of evading any future responsibility for future situations. “If I get trained, if I arm myself, then I will be responsible if something happens, because I will be able to do something, but that’s dangerous and scary, so I will make sure that I’m helpless, so that no one expects anything of me if I end up in a situation like that.” Such is the logic, even if it is not explicitly verbalized. This doesn’t fly, though. You aren’t excused by choosing to be helpless. You are simply making the choice to allow the crime to occur, the violence, the evil, before it even happens, to spare yourself hardship.

This is why no adult is innocent. No adult grows up in this fallen world unaware of its moral challenges, so no adult is excused from preparing for those challenges. As such, every adult who chooses not to prepare for those challenges not only does not escape responsibility for them but is complicit in the outcomes he could have thwarted had he prepared.

I use here the generic masculine, but women are by no means excluded. Their physical capabilities are lesser but hardly absent. Their responsibilities to society are more limited but hardly absent.

Prepare yourself now, because if in the future you find yourself witness to a rape, an assault, a school shooting or church shooting that you could have stopped if you began preparing now, the results will be on you. You will be judged accordingly.