Shooting Occurred Because Women Ran The School

[AtroposHeart]

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/1 ... he-school/

If there were fewer women and more “male aggression†in Sandy Hook Elementary School, the massacre there never would have taken place, according to a contribution to a leading conservative magazine.

National Review, whose in-house editorial suggested Newtown was the price of the Second Amendment, published a piece on Wednesday from anti-feminist Charlotte Allen suggesting the reason the shooter was able to kill so many students was because Newtown was a “feminized setting:â€

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.

Via Jessica Valenti, who notes that this is extraordinarily “disrespectful to the female teachers and staff at Sandy Hook. Allen mentions their heroism as an anomalous aside rather than exceptional bravery that saved lives. The bravery of the women in Newtown – principal Dawn Hochsprung and psychologist Mary Sherlach who rushed the shooter before being killed, teacher Victoria Soto who died protecting her students, Kaitlin Roig and Abbey Clements who hid their students and calmed them – is remarkable.â€

Allen went on to blame Lanza’s mother, saying “You simply can’t give a non-working, non-school-enrolled 20-year-old man free range of your home, much less your cache of weapons…Unfortunately, the idea of being an ‘adult’ and a ‘man’ once one has reached physical maturity seems to have faded out of our coddling culture.â€

[Guest Anonymous]

I'm so saddened and depressed by the news of last week's shooting I can barely cope with watching and reading the 'normal' reports of what happened.

I just.... this kind of bullshit 'anti-feminist' idiocy sends me right over the edge. :cry:

[dairyfreelife]

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/12/19/1361521/top-conservative-publication-newtown-happened-because-women-ran-the-school/

I was waiting for some anti-feminist to mention this and complain. I had a male principal in elementary, but he was small man. I doubt he could have taken a shooter down either, though I'm sure he would have tried. The Principal, psychologist and teachers who were murdered trying to save their students should be honored for caring and doing their job to try and protect the students.

[Austin]

Well, I knew this was coming.

My husband is schoolteacher, obviously a man, and a tall/big man at that. Machine gun fire, however, doesn't discriminate when it comes to gender or size. If stupid was a crime, the person who wrote this should be doing life.

[AddieBelle]

So this person thinks that a man being there would have stopped bullets? Really? Men can be shot just as easily as women

[ladyamylynn]

Frank DeAngelis, principal at Columbine High School at the time of the shooting, was unable to stop the massacre there, despite his all-powerful manliness. There. Logic. See how that works?

[Guest Anonymous]

Well, I knew this was coming.

My husband is schoolteacher, obviously a man, and a tall/big man at that. Machine gun fire, however, doesn't discriminate when it comes to gender or size. If stupid was a crime, the person who wrote this should be doing life.

And if brains were a disease, this person would be in the best of health.

[B5SnowDog]

If there were fewer women and more “male aggression†in Sandy Hook Elementary School, the massacre there never would have taken place, according to a contribution to a leading conservative magazine.

"Male aggression" is what started the bloody fucking thing in the first place! God, what a fuckwit.

[J'ean Skirt]

This one is so pissing me off I can barely write coherently! And it's not like she even gets any of her facts right. In fact, there was at least one man at the school and he was notifying teachers and getting doors locked.

:angry-screaming: :angry-steamingears: :angry-cussingblack:

[emmiedahl]

Also, I believe it was K-4.

[GryffindorFTW]

How many men were in that Aurora theatre, attending a midnight Batman screening? I'll be conservative and guess a reasonable 50% of the audience was male.

And aren't we all so glad they were able to rush the shooter and take out his knees, to save the lives of everyone in the theatre?

Yeah. That's what I thought.

Magical Y chromosomes do about as much to make you inherently courageous as they do to make you bulletproof. Nothing.

*Riffles

[camdendayton]

Ugh, F everyone at the National Review who was involved with this kind of trash being published! I agree it would be wonderful if more men were working in schools, but having A man in the building would have done nothing to stop this shooting.

You know why men don't work in elementary schools:

1. It's "women's work," and there are those who would be suspect of any man that works with small children and see them only as potential predators.

2. Pay, most men still want to be the breadwinner in their homes, so they stay away from jobs that require substantial education when the salary is not commensurate. Teaching is such a job, and you can't really get into administration without teaching.

I've worked at a school that was actively trying to hire a teaching staff that more closely resembled the community it served as well as male role-models for the students. It's hard to find well qualified male teachers.

*I did not read much of the article as my blood immediately began boiling.

[dairyfreelife]

Frank DeAngelis, principal at Columbine High School at the time of the shooting, was unable to stop the massacre there, despite his all-powerful manliness. There. Logic. See how that works?

Not to mention that one of the victims was a male teacher and I believe a couple football players were murdered too. And I think the principal was on the other side of the school at the time. All those males, yet no one was able to stop that massacre.

[ILoveJellybeans]

Men arent bullet proof. When someone has a gun, physical strength doesnt come into it, from the pictures of the gunman, he looks quite small and weak, but yet, because he had a gun, he managed to kill.

[RosyDaisy]

WHAT?? The shooting happened because TPTB at the school didn't have a penis?? This infuriates me! :angry-cussingblack: :angry-teeth: :angry-fire: :angry-screaming: :angry-steamingears: :angry-banghead: Fuck you National Review....just fuck you!

[Aisling]

Disgusting. These women threw themselves in front of kids & took bullets for them, but it isn't enough because they didn't possess penises?

Fuck it.

[Boltingmadonna]

Somehow I doubt that if the big boys at NR were present at a shooting, they'd be the ones to rush the shooter and save everybody. I think they'd be under the desks. And I love how they blame the shooter's mother. She dedicated her life to helping him for years--but whatever a woman does, it's never enough. Even if she's one of the murdered victims. The so-called men of National Review have no respect and no shame.

[Visionoyahweh]

We need to get rid of female nurses. They just coddle the diseases!

ETA: What's with Zerg rushing the shooter being our only hope of stopping shootings?

[J'ean Skirt]

We need to get rid of female nurses. They just coddle the diseases!

ETA: What's with Zerg rushing the shooter being our only hope of stopping shootings?

KIDS zerg rushing the shooter.

I've read it in at least 2 different places by two different writers. WTF is wrong with these people?

[Visionoyahweh]

KIDS zerg rushing the shooter.

I've read it in at least 2 different places by two different writers. WTF is wrong with these people?

Kids, adults, everyone Zerg Rushing. Teaching kids to blindly rush into almost certain death when something bad is going down ain't the lesson we need to teach.

[Guest Anonymous]

It's a fair bet that exactly the same people who make this kind of stupid comment would also be creeped out by the idea of men wanting to teach little kids. (I'm thinking of the most recent TTH thread about fathers, but I'm guessing that the logic would be exactly the same for male teachers).

[Wandering]

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/12/19/1361521/top-conservative-publication-newtown-happened-because-women-ran-the-school/

Stop the press here for a second. Is this woman seriously trying to say that a 12 year old boy could stand up to an assault weapon and hundreds of rounds of bullets? I don't think "crazy" is enough to cover this woman. Bolding mine

[J'ean Skirt]

Stop the press here for a second. Is this woman seriously trying to say that a 12 year old boy could stand up to an assault weapon and hundreds of rounds of bullets? I don't think "crazy" is enough to cover this woman. Bolding mine

Not living in the reality based world.

Functionally stupid.

Drunk all the koolaid.

Delusional.

Those phrases come to mind.

[Visionoyahweh]

Assuming a 12 year old could even get within arms reach of a gunman w/o taking a bullet.

After VA Tech I read a suggestion that someone could've picked up a laptop and THROWN it at the gun in the shooters hand. Action/War movies and TV have really warped people's frame of reference for how these things go down.

[J'ean Skirt]

Assuming a 12 year old could even get within arms reach of a gunman w/o taking a bullet.

After VA Tech I read a suggestion that someone could've picked up a laptop and turned it at the gun in the shooters hand. Action/War movies and TV have really warped people's frame of reference for how these things go down.

The thing that I never saw enough people talk about at Tech is that the building involved was on the engineering / english side of campus. That side of campus contained a lot of the classes that students in the corps of cadets attend. Tech started out as a military college and is one of only two schools in the US that has a military and a civilian student body. The corps is a huge part of Tech culture and the cadets do undergo military style training. Most of the corps is made of of ROTC members. It's a bit orthogonal to the lives of the civilian students, but I'm very proud of our Corps.

IOW, some of the men in those buildings Had Military Training. They were exactly the right kind of people to react well in that situation. Had there been things to do they would have done it. And, in fact, they did.

But none of that really made a difference when you have a shooter who is determined to kill people. Maybe it would have been different if the students or professors had been armed. Maybe. Maybe not.

Even outside of the military training a number of those students had, Tech is a land grant university. Many, many of our students come from the surrounding rural counties of Virginia. Many of these students have been raised with guns and hunting. We didn't get classes off for the opening of hunting season, but a lot of students did go home to hunt with family when possible. Most of them had weapons in their cars, to my great relief one night heading back to school. The car I was riding in hit a deer and injured it severely. The car behind us was another student who had a hunting knife in the car and took care of the deer (it was that or let the poor thing slowly bleed to death with two broken legs...).

I guess what I"m saying is that everyone who says "what if" and then proposes all these "more guns, better training" scenarios is clueless. They just don't have enough experience to know what they're talking about.

Oh, and I may have graduated in '92, and not been back in a dozen years, but it's still an important part of me, so I get a little jumpy when folks bring up the shootings there as some sort of "more guns, better!"