CHARGE!

In an otherwise run of the mill piece that goes through the various suggestions for gun control and shows that they would not have stopped Sandy Hook or some other example of a mass shooting, Megan McArdle finds it appropriate to end with this (my emphasis):

My guess is that we’re going to get a law anyway, and my hope is that it will consist of small measures that might have some tiny actual effect, like restrictions on magazine capacity.  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.

But I doubt we’re going to tell people to gang rush mass shooters, because that would involve admitting that there is no mental health service or “reasonable gun control” which is going to prevent all of these attacks.  Which is to say, admitting that we have no box big enough to completely contain evil.

So there you have it. Since there is no policy that would be 100% effective, we should just say fuck it and instead teach our kids that when the shooting inevitably starts they should counterattack. We should fucking drill them on it.

Fuck. That. I don’t want to live in a country that would provide fucking children with combat training because we can’t confront the demons of our gun-worshiping culture.

That is the most fucked up, repugnant “solution” I have ever heard to any problem. I can admit perfectly well that there is no solution, policy or otherwise, to preventing “all of these attacks”. There are some terrible people in the world and they do terrible things and no one can ever stop that. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything in our power to minimize the incidence. And it most certainly doesn’t mean that we should fling our kids into the gaping maw of gun violence while shrugging our shoulders and saying “meh, what can you do?”.

I don’t know how to solve the problem. I don’t even know where to begin. Maybe the beginning is nowhere and the problem is unsolvable. I don’t know. But what I do know is that we have to try. If the alternative is encouraging children to dive into the line of fire when the inevitable shooting starts, then we absolutely have to fucking try.

(via LGM)

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