Survival Tips! How to handle a massacre

After the Sandy Hook school massacre last week, there was the usual cry from conservatives “not to politicize” the tragedy by raising the issue of gun control. Of course, since “do nothing” is the conservative position, they were inherently politicizing the tragedy in order to shut down any debate. Besides that, however, conservatives were unusually quiet about the matter because even the gun fetishists realized that this massacre was more egregious and horrific than the usual mass murder. The NRA didn’t even issue a statement until days later and in the meantime pulled down their Facebook page to avoid what were sure to be millions of “dislikes”.

Now that a few days have passed, some have felt comfortable dropping their silence. As reported earlier, Mike Huckabee blamed the tragedy on the conservative fantasy of god being banned from public schools. He was joined by Newt Gingrich who blamed secularists. And various others have blamed gays, atheists, and even teacher’s unions.

But conservative writers Charlotte Allen and Megan McArdle win the competition hands down. In fact, they really, really win. WARNING: Exposing your brain to their comments WILL reduce your I.Q.

Here’s Charlotte Allen:

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.

Yes, if only a man had been there, he would have stopped the assault rifle-wielding maniac with his mighty bucket. Because apparently no men are ever killed in these assaults and because testosterone, I guess. And while the “feminized” Principal and School Psychologist did try to take down the killer, their estrogen apparently prevented their success. Of course, the janitor of the K-4 school was there and is a man. He saved lives by running through the school, warning classrooms and locking doors, but he apparently didn’t play high school football and left his bucket at home.

Now here’s Megan McArdle:

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.

Of course! Genius. If only the 6 and 7 year old children had gang rushed the shooter! That would have solved everything.

So, what have we learned? A valuable self-defense tip. If a guy comes into your classroom/office/mall and is shooting people with a high-powered, semi-automatic rifle with a thirty bullet magazine, you should rush him, especially if you’re a husky 12 year old boy, presumably creating a pile of bodies that will inhibit his future movements. What could go wrong with that?

Some people should just SFTU and be done with it.