Conservatives To Elementary School Kids: Throw Yourselves At The Next Gunman

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Conservatives — two, at least, notable writers — in wildly flawed and frightening attempts to find ways to avoid gun control, are now suggesting, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, that a classroom-full of, say, six-year olds, should throw themselves at the next gunman armed with a Bushmaster rifle, and that “some of the huskier 12-year-old boys” should have thrown themselves at Adam Lanza.

Yes they are.

Take, for example, libertarian writer Megan McArdle, a special correspondent for Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

In, “There’s Little We Can Do to Prevent Another Massacre,” McArdle takes the typically right-wing position: change is bad, and thus, there’s little we can do to prevent another massacre. McArdle laments the possibility of gun control laws, or any new law restricting (nefariously-called) “gun rights”:

My guess is that we’re going to get a law anyway, and my hope is that it will consist of small measures that might have some tiny actual effect, like restrictions on magazine capacity.  I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.  Would it work?  Would people do it?  I have no idea; all I can say is that both these things would be more effective than banning rifles with pistol grips.

[Bolding ours]

Alrighty then.

You have to just love the idea of someone advocating group suicide — which is what gang-rushing shooters effectively is — then proclaiming she has no idea if it would work.

Instead of “duck and cover,” let’s teach “leap and smother.”

Right.

If that’s not disgusting enough for you, take the National Review’s Charlotte Allen. But first, a reminder about the National Review.

The National Review used to be a bastion of respected conservative intellectualism. Founded by the revered (and, yes, reviled) William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955, the magazine wasn’t a home to conservative writers, it actually defined what conservatism should be — and what it should not be.

The “not” included Ayn Rand, the John Birch Society, George Wallace, and ultimately, Pat Buchanan. (Clearly, they lost much of that battle.)

Now, the National Review Online is home to racism, homophobia, bigotry, Maggie Gallagher, and Charlotte Allen.

“Like most people, I’ve been thinking and thinking about the Sandy Hook massacre. I’ve even pored over a map of the school and its killing sites — and studied a timeline of the incident, which appears to have unfolded over about 20 minutes,” writes uber-conservative Charlotte Allen:

I have three observations:

There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. 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.

Remember, this is a conservative.

The main point of Allen’s ignorant idiocy, as Zack Beauchamp at Think Progress writes, is the Sandy Hook “Shooting Occurred Because Women Ran The School.”

There’s more disgustingness in Allen’s editorial, but I cannot even begin to address it without wanting to hit my head against the wall.

So, first of all, every man, woman, and child in America who isn’t Charlotte Allen but who does listen to the news knows that the school was kindergarten through fourth grade, Not, “it was a K–6 school.” That’s just stupid at this point, and anyone who been paying the least bit of attention knows this. And Charlotte Allen is paid to know this, or to find out, so, fail.

Second, there was a “male janitor” in the school, and a male fourth grade teacher, so everything she wrote there is pure malarkey.

“Kevin Anzellotti, the head custodian at Sandy Hook, is a man,” Dave Weigel, in, “The Stupidest Thing Anyone Has Written About Sandy Hook,” at Slate reminds us. “Theodore Varga, a fourth grade teacher, also possesses XY chromosomes. I just did the research Allen didn’t do, and it took all of fourteen seconds. Beyond that, though — why does no one who writes this way look into the circumstances of other massacres?”

Weigel then, again, reminds us of the men who were heroes who tried to save others at the tragic Gabby Giffords shooting. They died.

“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,” Charlotte Allen writes.

Yes, let’s stop and think about 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.

First, there were no 12-year old boys, because 12-year old boys are in sixth grade. And there was no sixth grade.

Second, let’s pretend her statement isn’t pure garbage and vile and offensive and play along.

Adam Lanza had a Bushmaster AR-15 and two handguns and more than enough bullets for every one of the 450-600 students in Sandy Hook Elementary.

What that would have looked like is a lot of 12-year old boys and male teachers lying on the floor, dead.

Lanza put up to eleven bullets in some of the six and seven year old children.

And when, pray tell, does having a penis outweigh having a gun?

Charlotte Allen and Megan McArdle deserve to go down in history as two of the most fatuous, self-ndulgent, and just plain ignorant writers in America.

 

Image: “Memorials abound in Newtown….this one on road into Sandy Hook,” by Al Jones, via Twitter