Factual error: That is three sentences for five factual errors.

Hello? Editors? Hellooooo?

WOW

Some part of my brain just exploded.... Probably the passive, feminized part....

o_O

News flash: with a weapon that fires 200 rounds in ten seconds, ANYBODY is a sitting duck for a mass-murderer, male or female or child or what have you.

These idiots prove over and over again how ignorant and out of touch they are with REALITY. On the one hand, I suppose it's good that they have an outlet like The National Review or FOXNews to spew their idiocy. On the other hand, sane people have to tolerate their ignorant, limited, one sided banter. I honestly think that to be Republican these days, you simply must have the inability to walk in the footsteps of others. It's a lack of imagination that keeps these people in the dark.

If only the men were not all off hunting mammoths while the cowering, simpering and useless women were left back in the camp with the children and elderly and the village shaman! We could have put this rampage to a quick end with a good throw of a stone spear!

Charlotte Allen seems to be awfully stupid, for a woman.

@7: thank you for the howlingly good laugh that post provided.

The outrage over this falls flat considering that this blog suggested that we "Have Some National Conversations About Masculinity, Insecurity, Overcompensation, Dick Size... " just two days ago.

If you can blame it on masculinity, why are you outraged that someone else blames it on femininity?

Frankly, I think you're both assholes.

Men; those things we ought to keep around to protect us from men!

A less enlightened man might call Charlotte Allen a cunt.

In other words, if the female principal were a male principal, her reported lunge at the gunman would have resulted in him being subdued rather than her being murdered.

Yeah just like how no one was killed at Fort Hood because of all the manly highly trained soldiers with weapons around to stop it. Isn't logic the best?

The best comment I found on that article (and she's getting precious little support, all of it borderline illiterate):

Ms Allen is just a Republican woman helping us to understand why Republican men believe women are stupid.

why is Reading Specialist in quotation marks? does she think that is some honorary title or something?

Wow. Yes, lets think how Sandy Hook would have ended had 12 year old chubby boys intervened. Let's blame the female staffed school for this problem instead of the mentally ill MALE with the automatic gun. What a fucking idiot.

@18 - I do feel kind of awful for laughing at the mental image of Üter Zörker leading a mob of fat boys to tackle the gunman.

MALE AGGRESSION WAS THE PERPETRATOR OF THE DAMN THING.

Al Bundy and some chubby kids? That's the solution from these morons?

Wow. Somebody has been reading way too many John Gray "Venus & Mars" books. Maybe she could go out on a limb and crack open Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender" or Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett's "Same Difference". But in this dangerous, rapidly changing world, trite, sentimental, Ultra-Darwinist notions of strong, aggressive males and weak, passive females are so much more romantic and attractive than the actual truth.

@20 Exactly! We're always worshipping males for being so strong and aggressive, when it is male aggression that riddled these children full of bullets. And that's supposed to be "natural" or somehow pre-ordained? Ugh. Please.

Interesting fact: Men die at the same rate at the hands of automatic weapons fire as women!

There are massive cemeteries in France, Belgium, Germany, England & America which are a testament to this. Perhaps Ms. Allen is unaware of such historical events as WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the Arab-Israeli wars.

@10- The discussion about masculinity was started from the point of view that the expectation that men are encouraged to be armed and violent and this is bad (your Man Card is reissued when you buy a Bushmaster). It's hard to disagree.

This women's point of view is that women are inherently passive and incapable of self-defense. This is also a bad thing.

Frankly, I think you're missing the point.

You have got to give a little warning about your links. I shudder to think that my curiosity just inflated the clicks for that type of crap.

I am outraged.

@17,

I'm sure she thinks it's a fake job.

It's understandable.
Everyone gets to peddle their own bias as a "solution".
Not enough God in the classroom.
Too many women/not enough men in the school.
Too much tolerance for the gay lifestyle.
Not enough God in government.
Too much Socialism in government.
Not enough nationalism in schools.
Too much A in B.
Not enough C in D.
If more people did what I would tell them to do then things like this would not happen.

I tried to start a little something by posting a one star review for her book on Amazon and directing people to this article. Feel free to join in.

If there's one lesson to be learned from the shooting it's that women just can't do anything right.

@33 She writes? Books? Judging from her research ability (i.e. complete inability to read the fucking newspapers, I sure hope they're fiction.

I'm sure they're fiction. Whether that was her intent or not is the question.

Women can't be aggressive? Have you ever met a mother? I could walk through fire for my children and at least three women stood up to the shooter. They literally stood between him and children.

Throwing a bucket wasn't going to help.

Womenz: stop stealin' all them crap-paying, low-end thankless public school jobs! Hire some white alpha males to be hall monitors pronto.

Oh "reading specialist" being in quotations is because EVERYONE on the right knows reading is for fags and women. Real mean only take shop classes and hunt..with automatic weapons.

Never mind that women kept the massacre by a MALE from being worse than it otherwise would have been.

A male principal lunging at a crazy dickhead with a rifle is going to get shot too.

It seems that these killers believe in their hearts that they do not measure up to the mythical manly man image that this country insists all men should be. Their murder sprees are a big "I'll show you" statement, I suspect. In the past few years, the killers have all been the antithesis of the macho guy. They were defective in a variety of ways and not operating based on the same set of logic that motivates most people.

Nothing can prepare adults, let alone children, for reacting quickly enough when they are ambushed whether they are men or women.

Ahhh...when all else fails, blame the women!

Man, can you imagine? At the first shots those real men would rush the fray and be heroes like in the movies. I'm sure those kids would have been perfectly fine left alone in an uncertain and frightening situation.

Yeah, perhaps more dead children and teachers but the families need not cry since they died as warriors and now reside in Valhalla.

@25: Length of time for the total attack (from his entry to suicide) was about 10 minutes. Time spent firing was about 4 minutes from what I heard on a couple of reports.

@35,

She apparently has a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies which is just perfect for her. Too bad she won't stick strictly to that subject.

"National Review and National Review Online are America’s most widely read and influential magazine and website for Republican/conservative news, commentary and opinion. Both the magazine and website provide insightful and incomparable coverage of today’s — and tomorrow’s — most important political, economic, social, and cultural issues and trends.

National Review and National Review Online are the benchmark vehicles for reaching those Republicans/conservatives who lead and shape opinion on all the important issues."

This explains sooooooooo much.

@10 In this thread, as in the earlier one concerning gun adverts, we have the running theme of labeling a person, or group, as insufficiently masculine, in order to manipulate them into anti-social behavior.

The posts are consistent, not contrary.

"National Review and National Review Online are America’s most widely read and influential magazine and website for Republican/conservative news, commentary and opinion. Both the magazine and website provide insightful and incomparable coverage of today’s — and tomorrow’s — most important political, economic, social, and cultural issues and trends.

National Review and National Review Online are the benchmark vehicles for reaching those Republicans/conservatives who lead and shape opinion on all the important issues. " -NRO

This explains sooooooo much...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05MImdJIr…

@17, 31, 39:

I would guess that reading specialist is considered a fake job because to her mind, if a kid has problems with reading, it's just because he or she is lazy or something along those lines; disabilities don't exist, one simply isn't putting forth the right effort.

It's the same mindset that that Gun Owners CEO that Piers Morgan called stupid has. If you were foolish enough, like me, to watch the whole clip, you may recall that he dismissed mental illness as having any role in driving Adam Lanza; the shooter was simply evil.

At 11 or 12 years old, aren't the girls bigger than the boys?

Eugenics would have taken care of the shooter. Of course, it would have taken care of most of the hacks at the Stranger as well.

The fact that the shooter was male has very little to do with why he did what he did. Just as the fact that the principle was female has very little to do with why her attempt to defend her school failed. Let's get off the whole gender thing, okay?

Let's focus on the fact that a mentally unstable person was able to get their hands on powerful weapons.

Is it denying my feminine passivity to want to kick this guy in the nuts as hard as I can? And then maybe beat him about the face a bit? Am I not a woman for wanting to do this?

Ooh, just noticed that it's a lady. Still, fantasizing about a beatdown.

My grandmothers -- both of them teachers -- and numerous great-aunts and great-great-aunts, going back to the 1880s, would like to talk to you about your "helpless passivity" theory. I recommend stuffing your back pockets with comic books.

Fucking "conservatives" my ass.

@52 I wonder if your premise is valid regarding the gender of the shooter. I think we can extrapolate from the existing data that a severely emotionally-disturbed woman is probably more likely to just kill herself. For some reason, it seems to take a man to want to slaughter a bunch of people before killing himself. I suspect there's an important cultural factor at play in that, that might be worth studying.

@52, the article concerned (fake) gender issues. The commenters didn't bring up the "whole gender thing"; the article did.

She thinks we guys can deflect bullets with our cocks?

People; can everyone stop using the term automatic for the Bushmaster he was using? Got news for you... On full auto an automatic weapon with a 30 round clip is totally empty in 4 seconds. So unless he modified that Bushmaster after killing his mother and carried a shitload of clips for it he was definitely NOT using an automatic weapon. He was using a semi-automatic weapon. Most weapons these days are semi-automatic right down to clip using military weapons (belt fed weapons are still fully auto). Full auto weapons are expensive and mostly illegal to own, therefore since they say that his mother legally owned her weapons we can deduce that they were semi-auto not fully auto. If he had wanted a fully automatic weapon he would have had to make his own. For some reason I have doubts that it was within his abilities to make even a Gatling Gun. And while the cyclic rate of fire on that bushmaster is in the 450 - 500 rounds per minute range it would take one heck of a clip to do so. Also the barrel would be glowing and distorting before that minute was up. Obviously that didn't happen since there is no report of his weapon blowing itself apart.
If he had carried a bunch of speed loaders everything he did could have been done with a revolver. Of course using a 6 shot pistol to do all the murders would have taken more work due to the fact of having to do more reloads but it still could have been done and not taken much (if any) more time to do. Possibly less time since the human body (even a small child) can take more hits from a high speed round that simply passes thru if it doesn't hit anything on the instant critical list than from a much slower pistol round that takes its time and does more actual damage.

Oh and @5... Since the Bushmaster he used was not a Gatling type multi-barreled machine gun then it didn't even have anywhere close to the cyclic rate required to fire 200 rounds in 10 seconds. And I don't see anything on the Bushmaster website about them even making Gatling type weapons. 600 rounds per minute is pretty much the limit on single barrel cyclic rates and most are somewhat below that as a safety precaution.

@58: Only when it is hard, and I have not been taking my prescribed erection softners.

As you can tell, I am quite a manly man. I don't need some pansy-ass automatic weapon though.

@59 Thanks for the pedantry. Now, go look up ACP, and tell us which ammo it refers to and what the "A" stands for.

In common American English usage, semi-automatic/auto-loading pistols and shotguns are also correctly referred to as "automatics" even though they only fire one shot at a time. Considering the rarity of machine pistols, and the history of civilian guns, only military-style rifles ever really need to be clarified. Fully-auto rifles are also called "submachine guns," a term that has become less common in the newspapers since "The Mob" stopped gunning each other down with "Tommy Guns" in public, but is still the correct term to unambiguously describe them.

Sez here the shooting are caused by white boys being feminized and cracking under the strain. Or something. Glad they've cleared that up.

http://wonkette.com/493495/plucky-girl-c…

Sounds like Ken Mehlman reasoning to me.

The reason you don't hear about Thompson is because they're expensive, and they weigh a ton more than better modern subbies or assault rifles. You can buy a semi-auto version if you like. My gun-nuttiest gun nut friend has one.

http://www.gunsamerica.com/915865694/KAH…

@65: Many of us who care about gun regulation do know what we are talking about. And we recognize when the discussion is being derailed by some usage troll who goes off on a tangent about what an automatic versus semi-automatic weapon is.

Seriously; it's like if in a discussion on drunk-driving laws someone started saying, "Well, you clearly don't really understand the issues if you don't know the difference between the 1975 Chevy Impala and the 1976 model, which incorporated several key changes in the transmission and carburator."

@52- Mass shootings (and violent crimes in general) are committed much more often by men. There are valid questions concerning gender and violence.

@65 Holy crap. Not only are you a usage troll, you have reading comprehension deficiencies. Whatever prompted you to start expounding on why a submachine gun has "sub" in it? A fully-auto M-16 is a submachine gun, as is a Thompson. Are we failing to communicate?

Once again, the Colt 1911A1 pistol is called "an automatic," an auto-loading shotgun is correctly referred to as "an automatic shotgun," even thought they're both semi-auto. There aren't that many full-auto rifles in circulation, as you correctly noted, so unless someone is described with a "submachine gun," or some specific reference is made to "full-auto" or "burst mode," please feel free to assume that we're all talking about auto-loaders/semi-automatics, okay?

I'm with @70.
Use the terms that have already been defined and use them correctly.
Otherwise, you end up with something like the last "ban" which did nothing to change the functionality of firing bullets.

Strangely enough, there seem to be a lot of SLOG readers who are actively opposed to learning anything on the subject.
Remember, the knowledge itself cannot hurt you.
It might even help.

Example: make the new ban require magazines with smaller dimensions so that the existing 30 round magazines cannot fit in the magazine well of the new "ban friendly" guns. Or larger so that they don't lock correctly. Or with other flanges.
But that suggestion could only come from someone who understands the differences between guns and how guns work.
Fear will not help you write good legislation.

Charlotte Allen has penis envy, obviously.

Gun bans which rely on the minutae of what the last ten or so comments have been about can not be successful, which is why the 90's AWB was essentially useless.

There will always be a manufacturer or a person that will find out how to skirt the law on a technicality.

A ban can only have a real effect if it addresses the real problem: high capacity semi-automatics, and the prevalence of cheap handguns. Ban semi-automatics entirely (especially in cities), and the problem will slowly go away.

But good luck with this congress!

Ted, you can't ban "all semi-automatics." That's almost every gun made today. That wouldn't pass constitutional muster.

That'r right: Two hundred and twenty-one years ago, some guys wrote twenty-seven words on a piece of paper, so now there is nothing anyone can do to change things.

You do realize how fucking ridiculous that sounds, right?

This pisses me off no end. Both the principal and the school psychologist acted heroically, and their selfless acts are dismissed because they were female. A custodian also saved lives by warning teachers and students that there was a shooter, when anyone's impulse would have been to run - and his selfless act is erased because he is male.

Someone please tell me: Is there anything that defines and embodies "male aggression" more than a male rather aggressively brandishing a muderous weapon?

Male aggression is what has been behind 61 out of the last 62 mass shootings in the country, ie only ONE female has been the shooter out of the last 62 times we have gone thru this. (This despite the fact that a whopping 35% of gun owners are women.) Imagine if it was the reverse -imagine the conversation we'd be having in this country if 61 out of the last 62 mass shootings were perpetrated by women, and not men. Of COURSE everyone would be saying - you'd be nuts not to - "My god, what in the hell is up with our women? Why are they like this? We have to examine this - we have to do something about the way we are raising and socializing our girls." And yet ... is anyone asking these same questions about modern day males? Is this the focus at all? Nope. The conversation has been almost entirely about gun control and mental illness.

Our refusal to acknowledge or somehow even recognize this, and the resulting complete lack of discussion about what is up with today's boys and men - what we are doing so very wrong as a culture when it comes to them - is only going to serve to guarantee more mass shootings.