Horrendous crimes, such as the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, elicit emotional responses, to be sure. They, unfortunately, also elicit an array of silly, if not incredibly ridiculous ones.
To wit, Charlotte Allen writing at NRO:
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. 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.
[…]
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.
It is incredibly easy to imagine what Sandy Hook would have looked like if there had been more male teachers, even ex-linebackers: instead of six dead female faculty members, there would have been some number of male and female teachers dead.
And, please: “There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees.” More likely: there wasn’t even a male janitor to be shot whilst Lanza came down the hall with a semiautomatic assault rifle in his hands. Assault rifles trump buckets.
I sometimes think that the biggest crime committed by action movies when it comes to mass shootings is not that they glorify violence, but because they make it look so darn easy to take out the bad guy.
I find this sort of Monday morning quarterbacking about a mass shooting to be utterly reprehensible (although not as bad a John Derbyshire after the VaTech slayings who questioned why those being shot at didn’t “count the shots and jump” the shooter).
But only if there had been a bucket-wielding ex-football player mopping up…
