Tag Archives: Megan McArdle

General discussion

They believe in nothing

4 Comments

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.

 

 

General discussion

I have no idea

2 Comments

Among the many policy suggestions following the mass murder in Newtown Connecticut, this one from Megan McArdle is nearly indistinguishable from an Onion article (via Balloon Juice):

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.

She has no idea whether it would work, but she's certain it would work better than gun control.