Thursday, December 20, 2012

No, This Is The Stupidest Thing You’ll Read

Earlier this week I shared the wit and wisdom of Megan McArdle, who said the solution to school shootings was teaching the kids to gang-tackle the attacker, thus making it easier for the coroner to find the bodies.  I called it “probably the stupidest thing you’ll read today.”

My apologies to Ms. McArdle.  Or at least I should tell her to get out of the way; she’s been overtaken by Charlotte Allen at the National Review, who says that the reason all those kids died was because there weren’t enough men and well-built 12-year-old boys at Sandy Hook Elementary.

In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.

Seriously, where does she get this shit?

Over at SFDB, Rick posted about a gun-stroking blog where, in one breath, one commentator lambasted teachers for being lazy, overpaid slackers and tools of the teachers union, then suggested that they spend all their time off in the summer getting training in firearms.

Two questions: who would pay for that, and, more importantly, does this person really want to arm a group of people that he just branded as incompetent thugs?

5 barks and woofs on “No, This Is The Stupidest Thing You’ll Read

  1. Why can’t we be more sensible about guns? How many more innocent people have to pay for this love of semi-automatic weapons? Why would any ordinary person need one? I just don’t understand how many more people have to die before we do something. I am so tired of the NRA and others who want us to have more guns, and not less.

  2. Christmas will be interesting at my dad’s this year. He’s TEA Party / NRA all the way. One sister-in-law is the opposite, and she is unafraid of speaking her mind. This ought to be fun.

  3. I wonder if this sentiment is why they all piled on behind Sarah Palin. You know, Mrs. Helicopter-Wolf-Hunting, “Pit Bull with Lipstick” she-woman.

    Honestly, do these people hear themselves – especially when they can’t even keep their own narrative consistent?

    • Oh, and FYI Benen has a brilliant take-down of the “accuracy” of the article:

      I’m also struck by Allen’s total disregard for facts.

      She wrote there was “not a single adult male on the school premises,” which isn’t true. She wrote that Sandy Hook was “a K–6 school,” which isn’t true. She wrote all of the teachers at the school were women, which isn’t true. She said there was no male janitor, which isn’t true. Indeed, Andrew Kaczynski noted that the “first two sentences” in Allen’s piece “contain five factual errors.”

      What’s more, there were no “husky 12-year-old boys” at the school.

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