Shooting Occurred Because Women Ran The School

[Convicted Blossom]

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

snip

Look at the URL, "thinkprogress", there's not much thinking or progress there. Why do these right wing batshit organisations give themselves liberal names?

[Jana814]

What a bunch of CRAP!! All of the women who died in the shooting I think are HEROS!! The 1st grade teacher who save all those kids, most importanly. Also I think the school was a K-4 one, but I could be wrong.

[JenniferJuniper]

"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."

Umm. Okay. Thought about it. And the answer is:

They'd be dead now too.

WTF is wrong with these people?

[Jesus Camp Counselor]

snip

Look at the URL, "thinkprogress", there's not much thinking or progress there. Why do these right wing batshit organisations give themselves liberal names?

Think Progress is a liberal site. They ran an article quoting the crazy.

[Wandering]

What a bunch of CRAP!! All of the women who died in the shooting I think are HEROS!! The 1st grade teacher who save all those kids, most importanly. Also I think the school was a K-4 one, but I could be wrong.

You're right it was a K-4 school. Crack pot can't even get her facts straight.

[J'ean Skirt]

Think Progress is a liberal site. They ran an article quoting the crazy.

The original article was published at the National Review.

[kpmom]

Isn't it funny, when I read that all of the educators killed were female, and were being called heroes, I figured the fundies would jump on the "too many females, not enough males" bandwagon. Although this is from The National Review, and not our usual fundy blowhards, same difference.

I'm sure it bothers people like this to no end that those educators, those female educators, stood in front of a man with automatic weapons and took bullets that may have been used on children instead. That is the highest form of heroism any human can attain. And it was 6 women who did it.

Suck on it Nat'l Review.

[Katiebug]

Fucking hell, my husband has been waiting in line at the funeral home for over 2 hours for Dawn Hochsprung's visitation. He is still outside the building because so many people have come to pay their respects - people who never met her or any of her family, even people from other states. We may not ever know how many lives she saved by confronting the shooter, she died in the process but that bought precious time for her staff to lock down as much of the school as possible.

If there had been a couple of male teachers who were former football players or wrestlers and tried to jump the shooter, they'd be just as dead too.

[emmyfair]

I am honestly seeing red right now. Honestly.

[wildcatgrrl]

Wait.

"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."

From http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12 ... oting?lite:

"A custodian warned of the gunman by running through the halls, said 4th-grade teacher Theodore Varga. 'He said, "Guys! Get down! Hide!"" Varga said. 'So he was actually a hero.'"

That could be Kevin Anzellotti, Head Custodian as per the Sandy Hook School website. And the quoted teacher, Theodore Varga? He's totally a dude as well. See? http://myschooldesk.net/newtown/teacher ... mid.118648

The dumbasses at National Review should learn to Google. Not that theirs was a valid theory even if it were true. But now they look even more stupid. Guess it's too much to hope they're a misguided version of The Onion?

[Black Aliss]

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?

For that matter, weren't there plenty of adult males in the Aurora, Co theater audience? How about in the VA Tech classrooms? In the Clackamas Town Center? Oikos University? Chardon, Ohio? Nickel Mines, PA? Red Lake High School?

[Jana814]

Fucking hell, my husband has been waiting in line at the funeral home for over 2 hours for Dawn Hochsprung's visitation. He is still outside the building because so many people have come to pay their respects - people who never met her or any of her family, even people from other states. We may not ever know how many lives she saved by confronting the shooter, she died in the process but that bought precious time for her staff to lock down as much of the school as possible.

If there had been a couple of male teachers who were former football players or wrestlers and tried to jump the shooter, they'd be just as dead too.

Amen!! That is all I have been hearing about this woman was that she was a HERO!! As was the 1st grade teacher who hid her students in the closet!!

[BlueberryBird]

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!"

I was there. In a neighboring building, but we heard almost everything. The building was systematically prepared. Norris is an older building, realistically easy to lock down. The exit doors were chained shut. Norris was not picked out of a hat--it was the perfect setting. Cho was armored the fuck up and heavily armed. The reaction time boiled down to barricading the door, not racing to confront him. A trained military sniper would have been challenged. Students were saved because they jumped out the windows. It was all over in less than 3 minutes. Hundreds of shots. These people really think a student is going to pull a gun out of a backpack and make a one in a million head shot with near zero reaction time? And do it before getting mowed down? I heard lots of fuckwits talk about guns saving the day; Imdidnt hear any of my ROTC friends saying that crap. They knew better, robably because they did have some training and realize what is realistic.

I really can't even discuss this without shaking. My major classes were heavily shared with environmental engineering and they had heavy losses.

So, with this fuckery. Why is "reading specialist" in scare quotes?

[J'ean Skirt]

I was there. In a neighboring building, but we heard almost everything. The building was systematically prepared. Norris is an older building, realistically easy to lock down. The exit doors were chained shut. Norris was not picked out of a hat--it was the perfect setting. Cho was armored the fuck up and heavily armed. The reaction time boiled down to barricading the door, not racing to confront him. A trained military sniper would have been challenged. Students were saved because they jumped out the windows. It was all over in less than 3 minutes. Hundreds of shots. These people really think a student is going to pull a gun out of a backpack and make a one in a million head shot with near zero reaction time? And do it before getting mowed down? I heard lots of fuckwits talk about guns saving the day; Imdidnt hear any of my ROTC friends saying that crap. They knew better, robably because they did have some training and realize what is realistic.

I really can't even discuss this without shaking. My major classes were heavily shared with environmental engineering and they had heavy losses.

So, with this fuckery. Why is "reading specialist" in scare quotes?

I'm so sorry, Blueberry. I can't even begin to imagine. And, yeah, I'm pretty sure that none of the actual cadets said anything like that.

*hugs*

[Vex]

I am at the point of completely giving up on the US. It's getting worse. This literally made me feel sick.

[sacrilicious]

Blueberry, I am so sorry. I agree, people who are saying this have no clue.

I'm so disgusted by all of the people hijacking this tragedy to promote their crazy theories. Not all Americans are like this, I swear! Most of us are normal!

[OkToBeTakei]

I am just kind of done with this crap. What the fuck seriously?

We lost 16 5yr olds in a gun shooting in my country. We banned guns within a year. It seems simple. It kind of was.

I do not remember all this fucking bullshit.

The 'adults' are just going to let this happen again because they 'want' their 'rights.'

The only difference between them and the kiddies is they have a choice. Wrong one btw. Blame and excuses and finger pointing solves nothing.

[Vex]

I am just kind of done with this crap. What the fuck seriously?

We lost 16 5yr olds in a gun shooting in my country. We banned guns within a year. It seems simple. It kind of was.

I do not remember all this fucking bullshit.

The 'adults' are just going to let this happen again because they 'want' their 'rights.'

The only difference between them and the kiddies is they have a choice. Wrong one btw. Blame and excuses and finger pointing solves nothing.

The same thing here. We had a mass murder, gun laws were cracked down on, nobody complained. The rights of the many don't always trump the welfare of a few. Selfish, entitled fucks.

[pomology]

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.

I can imagine that. They would have been sprayed with bullets and murdered just like the female teachers. When you have a gun that shoots a huge number of bullets one after the other, it doesn't matter how big and bulky and full of testosterone you are--the bullets still rip right through you, no?

I read somewhere that the murderer killed himself when he did because the police were closing it, but I'm sure it was because they were the police and not because they were dudes.

[Vex]

Don't be silly, Pom. Of course it was the big, scary men that made the murderer turn his gun on himself. Men are impervious to bullets, don't you know?

[Jinger Jar]

If the Sandy Hook teachers and administrators had pushed past kids trying to be the first to escape, or locked themselves in bathrooms and closets to hide from the shooter, Charlotte Allen would dump on them for being cowards and would lament that MEN would have acted more bravely.

If they had used their students as human shields (because men have NEVER used children as human shields, nuh-huh), Allen would have excoriated them, and rightly so. She would be issuing a call to put RIGHTEOUS MEN in elementary schools from coast to coast.

Allen refuses to respect the fact that those women died protecting other people's children. Not their own kids, stranger's children. At least one of the teachers was found on top of a bunch of kids; she'd tried to cover as many of them as she could with her body in an attempt to save their lives. She knew what she was doing. She knew she was going to die.

But that's not good enough for Charlotte Allen because the teacher did not have a penis.

"Well, if the "read specialist" had been a man, he would have rushed the shooter and used his manly muscles to wrestle the guns away from him. Then he would have bent the barrels of the shooter's assault rifles with one had while clasping his wrists together with the other. Then he would have shot fireworks out his ass while singing "American the Beautiful". Rambo would've ridden in on his Harley shooting exploding arrows at the killer with his homemade compound bow, and John Wayne would've wrapped all the children up in Old Glory and rode off into the sunset on his stallion. The grateful lady teachers would then fall to their knees thankful that the manly men were there to save them all as they wiped tears of joy and gratitude from their eyes with their aprons before disappearing into the cafeteria kitchen to bake cookies."

I mean, really...

(And why in God's name is reading specialist in quotes like it's a pretend profession or something? That alone shows how little Allen knows about education.)

Teachers are not sworn peace offices. We take no oath to protect and to serve. Administrators are not sworn peace officers. They take no oath to protect and to serve. School site personnel - janitors, office staff, cafeteria workers - are not sworn peace officers. They do not take an oath to protect and to serve. Most importantly, CHILDREN are not sworn peace officers. They CANNOT take an oath to protect and to serve.

Unlike sworn police officers, we in the schools - men, women, and children - vary wildly in our physical fitness levels, our hearing, and our eyesight. Some of us are barely five feet tall. Some of us don't crack 90 pounds with our coats and shoes on. Some of us use mobility aids. Some of us cannot run at all, while others of us have very little upper body strength.

Unlike sworn police officers, we do not have to pass psychological screenings. The tiny, quiet office manager might be the bravest of the bunch, while the buff, ex-Marine history teacher might be in counseling for combat-related PTSD and would freeze solid if he heard an assault rifle firing.

All of this is a windy way of saying, Charlotte Allen, that people who get into education, either as professionals or as support staff - don't do it thinking that they're going to have to one day charge a mentally ill man who's blazing away with assault rifles. Man or woman, we're not trained for it nor should we be. Man or woman, we're not equipped for it nor should we be. I don't think there is a teacher working in the US who doesn't understand on some level that gun violence could come to their school at any time. But it's not something we can go to work expecting or else we wouldn't be able to do our actual job, which is to counsel and guide and teach children.

And the fact that Allen thinks it's entirely appropriate to expect or encourage a 12-year-old child to charge a shooter shows perfectly how little she understands children and education. "Okay, Jayden. You're the beefiest kid we've got, so here's the deal. We're going to sit you right here in the office by the front door. If you see someone come in with a gun, we want you to run up to him and try to tackle him. You got that? Great! You're really helping us out here."

Charlotte Allen is simply ridiculous. But you know what? I think she should disseminate her ideas as widely as possible. I think she should read her essay to the people of Newton, CT in person. I would gladly dip into my retirement savings to witness Allen reading her drivel in front of the widowers, children, grandchildren, partners, co-workers, surviving students, friends, and neighbors of those six women. I want her to face them, and I want her to see in faces staring back at her just how revolting and vile her thinking is.

[Visionoyahweh]

I'm sorry I mentioned Tech, Blueberry.

[BlueberryBird]

I'm sorry I mentioned Tech, Blueberry.

Believe me, we've been thinking of it ever since. I have friends who were completely shattered because they lost several friends, their advisor, etc. and a good professor friend lost several colleagues. Really, compared to them, I was on the periphery. What haunts me is the line of ambulances outside the building we were locked down in. I actually can't tell you how many there were because I see dozens in my nightmares.

I teach high school now and when we have lock down drills, even with advance notice, I have to sternly shake myself into a proper headspace.

I just ache that these small children are going to be going through worse.

But, I can tell you that the VT community closed ranks so tightly and helped us all heal. Anybody who has atteneded Tech knows that for all its huge state university size, it feels tiny and cozy. I hope for the same in Newtown.

I've also been praying ever since that April that VT holds this "record" forever.

[wtfrenchtoast]

What about Dave Sanders at Columbine? He did his best to help students escape and was killed in the process. The selfless acts of the teachers and administrators at Sandy Hook is not something to be shamed or mocked. I can't imagine someone being so incredibly brave. The one who haunts me is Victoria Soto, who hid her students in the closet and told the gunman they were in gym class. She didn't even try to hide herself. Not to mention the principal and psychologist who literally rushed the gunman. What did that get them? Bullet-riddled bodies, but they also saved countless lives when they tried to stop him. Fuck this woman. Makes me sick.

[Lillybee]

Did she assume that Fort Hood was full of women having a quilting bee? If the trained studly males there couldn't stop the shooter before he killed so many, how could unarmed teachers and imaginary twelve year old boys do anything about it.