Megan McArdle published a lengthy, rather provocative piece yesterday on the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, making the case that there’s simply not much Americans can do to prevent similar tragedies in the future. There may be proposals on the table, McArdle argues, but they tend to be ineffective, unconstitutional, or impractical.
That’s not an uncommon sentiment on the right, and it wouldn’t be especially noteworthy, were it not for this tidbit of advice McArdle included in her piece, flagged by Jon Chait.
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.
Just so we’re clear, McArdle wasn’t kidding. As best as I can tell, her piece wasn’t intended as satire or an attempt at humor.
Now, I can appreciate outside-the-box thinking as much as the next guy, and I understand that writers sometimes use blog posts as a sketch pad to flesh out unconventional ideas, some of which may not be fully formed. But I’d also like to go on record saying it strikes me as unwise for a society to encourage young, unarmed children, during a violent massacre, to run towards well-armed madmen.
Chait added, “You think gun control is impractical, so your plan is to turn the entire national population, including young children, into a standby suicide squad? … Unless I am missing a very subtle parody of libertarianism, McArdle’s plan to teach children to launch banzai charges against mass murderers is the single worst solution to any problem I have ever seen offered in a major publication.”
And if this seems vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s eerily reminiscent of a similar piece we saw five years ago.









