National Review Writer Blames Sandy Hook Shootings On "Feminization"

You often see some doozies over at National Review Online, but this post by Charlotte Allen on Sandy Hook wins a medal for Most Dooziest:

There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. 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.

There were lots of males in the Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado - I don't recall anybody trying to take him out.

In fact, the police found him out back behind the theater afterwards.

Also, it's kind of hard to "heave a bucket" at somebody who has got enough weaponry on him to take out a platoon.

I don't understand the need of right wingers to decry the "feminization" of the culture or the society or schools or education programs or whatever.

Is there not enough macho John Wayne bullshit in the American culture for them?

Our country has engaged in two major wars in the last ten years.

We regularly bomb people into oblivion with unmanned drones.

Our president has a "kill list."

Seriously, I don't think the country has a "feminization" problem.

Rather, it seems to me the country has a macho John Wayne bullshit problem where we decide we're going to declare "war" on everything - from poverty to drugs to terrorism to obesity.

It's not an accident that this country is the most violent "civilized" country in the world.

We are a violent people with a violent history who stole the land through violence, expanded the territory through more violence, and continue to regularly rain down violence on anyone we think is "our enemy."

I don't know exactly what it would mean for the country to be more "feminized," but I do know that whatever we are now, it ain't that.

As for trying to stop future Sandy Hooks, why don't the right wingers see that the answer is not more guns, more security or more violence.

It's mental health awareness.  It's social and emotional learning.  It's access to physical and emotional health care.

It's realizing that the more we try and "control" things through security and guns and fear, the more uncontrollable our society becomes.

And if you look around right now, you see a country with lots of top down controls and security and a whole lot of stuff that is just out of control.