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.Good heavens! The best solution McArdle can come up with is to train little children and youths to rush shooters with automatic weapons? The principal and the school psychologist heroically rushed Lanza to try to stop him, and they are now dead. How does this sort of mad idea rate a forum in what was once a respectable magazine? At one time, we subscribed, but, years ago, when Newsweek was reduced to about six pages, not counting ads, I told Grandpère, "Enough already." By then, the sparse content was already pathetic.
H/T to Charles Pierce.
Agrrrah! I invite her to go first. Maybe she can get 11 more people who think like her to take the plunge with her. Certifiably brain dead for sure.
ReplyDeleteMegan's suggestion boggles my mind, that's for sure.
DeleteI wonder, just how many shooters has Miss Megan ever rushed?
ReplyDeleteAlso, is it really ideal that absolutely everyone in our society from white-haired grandmas down to first-graders be turned into little Rambos everywhere they go, 24/7?
What crap. What malarkey. What a barbaric view of life - a perpetual state of war, within and without. That's where her head is, whether she realizes it or not.
It's also a screwed up, pretending-to-be-enlightened way of blaming the victims. You know?
I can only conclude that Megan wrote the column during a lapse into temporary insanity.
DeleteI've never heard of this person, but I can imagine telling a class full of little children, "No, children, when a shooter enters the room, all of you get up and do a pigpile on him. That way you'll save everyone else in the school." What a crock. When tragedies such as this happen, people with daft ideas often come out of the woodwork and say things that, with a bit more consideration, they might refrain from saying. My sainted mother used to say, "If you keep your big fat bazoo shut you won't get into trouble." Too bad Megan's mom didn't say that to her.
ReplyDeleteChris, I'd never heard of McArdle, either. In the grip of emotion after the shootings, I imagine people said a good many things that they'd like to take back, but her suggestion is one of the wackiest and most dangerous I've seen, along with principals and teachers being armed and having shootouts in the schools.
DeleteIn fact if an entire crowd really did rush a shooter it would probably successfully bring him down, but in the cold hard light of day crowds will never do that, because it's too counterintuitive. Adults wouldn't do it, let alone little children. The instinct to flee from danger is too strong.
ReplyDeleteThose in the front line of the rush would certainly be killed, and who knows how long it would take for 6 or 7 year olds to bring the shooter down, if they could. It's madness.
DeleteActually it reminds me of one of Bill Bryson's books where he quotes a professor who says that to deal with grizzly bears one should lie down and pretend to be dead but with brown bears one should rush at it shouting. Bryson says of the latter suggestion, "Yeah. You first, professor."
ReplyDelete