Women are to Blame for Sandy Hook Tragedy

Yes, you read that headline right. Women are to blame for the school shooting that took the lives of 20 kids and six adults last week. Women.

You know, I spend a lot of time defending women in all sort of situations, but I never thought I would have to be talking about such an awful topic on this site.

But here I am.

According to this appalling article by Charlotte Allen at National Review Online (which I despise linking to because I hate to give them any promotion, but I think it’s important to cite your sources), women are the reason Sandy Hook was a massacre. Had there only been men there to stop it, we would not have had such a tragedy to contend with.

At the time of the shooting, the Sandy Hook staff was entirely female. Weak, helpless females who couldn’t defend themselves or the children.

This article is wrong on so many levels. So much wrong. Where do I start?

Bullets don’t discriminate.

The principal is said to have lunged at the shooter. Well, she must have failed in her attempt because she was a woman, right? Um, no. She failed to stop him because he had an assault rifle and he shot her. Hello? Had the principal been a man, he would be dead right now, too. Having different genitalia does not make one bulletproof.

Size doesn’t matter

Although no physical details have been released about the shooter’s height and weight, we can see from photos that he was a tall and fairly skinny. The question is then “would a man have been able to take him down”? Again, guy with gun vs. guy without gun = guy with gun wins.

Wrong comparison

The article references Flight 93, where a group of men courageously banded together and went after the hijackers on the plane. It compares Flight 93 to Sandy Hook saying if there had been a group of men there, they could have stopped the shooter.

Let’s think about this for a second. In a typical school, name one location where you would find more than say 2-3 adults in the same space at the same time during a typical school day? The office? Maybe. Teacher’s lounge? Perhaps. The odds of that group of adults being all men? Incredibly small. If there had been men on staff at Sandy Hook, they likely would have been scattered throughout classrooms and the office. Not the same as an enclosed airplane. Not even close.

And that argument also fails in that the men on Flight 93 had a few moments of time to plot their move. Sandy Hook staff had just seconds to react. Completely different dynamics. That aside, could a group of men have taken down the shooter at Sandy Hook? Given the split second reaction time and the fact that no one was armed but the shooter and I’m going to go with “NO” for the overall answer there.

And if you want to get right down to it… look at some of the other school shootings… there were men in those schools and yet those tragedies still happened. Women are not to blame here.

Why didn’t the boys do something?

Charlotte goes on to write:

Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.

Seriously? You want unarmed boys to go after a man with semi-automatic weapons? What are they supposed to do? Hit him over the head with a math book? Stab him with a pencil? What do you propose they do?

And by the way, Charlotte, Sandy Hook enrolls students up to the 4th grade. That would make the oldest students 10 year olds. Get real.

Celebrate the real heroines

If you look at what went down at Sandy Hook, the women actually did amazingly heroic things. The principal turned on the PA system to alert the classrooms and lunged at the shooter in an attempt to stop him. She was no match for his bullets, but her actions alerted the entire school of the danger.

Teachers immediately reacted to the commotion overheard on the intercom and moved quickly to shelter students and keep them quiet and comforted. One teacher hid her students in a closet and told the shooter her class was in the gym. She was gunned down but the students she led to safety were spared. Another teacher barricaded herself and her students to keep them safe. They also survived.

In my view, those WOMEN acted appropriately given the horror they were facing. Having men there wouldn’t have changed a thing. Revisit Columbine if you need an example of this sort of tragedy with men and high school boys thrown into the equation.

Stop the blame game already

We weren’t there. Making judgements on whether someone did or didn’t do enough in that situation is extremely unfair. I’m not here to say who or what is to blame for these horrible events, but I can tell you one thing. Women aren’t at fault.

You will have to excuse my rant. This is not a topic I intended to cover, but I can’t let the absurdity of the article go without countering it with some facts and logic. It would be really nice if some folks would stop blaming women for anything and everything. Don’t you think?