Two semi-related items today.  First, here's Newt Gingrich's version of the secularism has caused mass shootings argument, from Thinkprogress:

When you have an anti-religious, secular bureaucracy and secular judiciary seeking to drive God out of public life, something fills the vacuum. And that something, you know, I don’t know that going from communion to playing war games in which you practice killing people is necessarily an improvement.

What is "secular bureaucracy"?  Is it anything not identifical with the Cardinalium Collegium?  And the secular judiciary?  I wonder what kinds of judgements a non-secular judiciary would or could impose.  I'll leave that to you as an exercise.

Second item.  Here is DougJ at Balloon Juice on the Megan McArdle comment the other day. 

In case you missed ABL’s post yesterday, this appears to be Megan McArdle’s principled libertarian position on preventing mass shootings:

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

For now, people are mostly making fun of this idiocy (Sullivan; Chait; Josh Marshall), but I wonder: how long til someone at Slate takes the contrarian position “sure, it’s easy to mock Megan McArdle for saying this but once you get past the conventional wisdom of our hippie overlords you will see the logic, and, empirically, the Finns have a proud tradition of shooter-rushing, which children learn from an early age, and they have a much lower rate of mass shootings blah blah blah”.

Yes, I too wonder whether McArdle will get iron-manned.  Another exercise: let's see some Iron Men of McArdle's argument.