But here's a really stupid thing, something she actually let loose from her keyboard so the Internet could suffer her stupidity right alongside her:
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.
Because of course, men never get shot. There were plenty of men in the Aurora movie theater, and people died. This isn't a gender thing. It's the unbalanced advantage a guy with a military-style rifle loaded with lots of bullets has over people whose flesh is ripped apart by said bullets.
What is so difficult about understanding that? Of all the apologetics I've read for why guns are never, ever the problem, this one ranks as the stupidest. Because there were no men on the campus?
But wait, it gets even dumber when she turns to Adam Lanza, who she says was coddled and enabled by his mother.
Parents of sick children need to be realistic about them. I know at least two sets of fine and devoted parents who have had the misfortune to raise sons who were troubled for genetic reasons beyond anyone’s control. Either of those boys could have been an Adam Lanza. You simply can’t give a non-working, non-school-enrolled 20-year-old man free range of your home, much less your cache of weapons. You have to set boundaries. You have to say, “You can’t live here anymore — you’re an adult, and it’s time for you to be a man. We’ll give you all the support you need, but we won’t be enablers.” Unfortunately, the idea of being an “adult” and a “man” once one has reached physical maturity seems to have faded out of our coddling culture.
Hm. Wait a minute here. On the one hand, the problem at the school is an absence of men, and on the other it's the mother's fault because she "coddled" the man-child? What twisted logic arrives at stupid conclusions like this?
Here's a newsflash for Charlotte Allen: It's not that hard to simply say that Adam Lanza exercised free will and walked into a school full of people with a damned arsenal worthy of Baghdad at the height of the Iraq war. He then used those weapons of human destruction to destroy. To destroy children. To destroy teachers. To destroy women.
It would behoove Ms. Allen to think about what she spews before she deems it worthy of anyone else's attention. This kind of nonsense just blows smoke over the real problem, which stems from the fearmongering nonsense conservatives spew out on a daily basis.
They argue they need guns in case the government goes out of control. I've got news for them, courtesy of an old friend. Their government has nuclear weapons, tanks and grenades, paid for by the taxpayers. So good luck with that attempt to "keep your government in line." It's a BS line for a BS argument.
Sandy Hook may have suffered a tragedy last week, but it would not have been the enormous tragedy that it was without the assistance of weapons that do not belong in any civilian's hands. That's all, Ms. Allen. End of discussion.
