"False security is more dangerous than none"

Megan McArdle opposes practically every policy that's being proposed to "prevent another Newtown," quoting Dr. Johnson:
How small, of all that human hearts endure
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!
She makes one sensible proposal, I think, which is to try to  train people to rush a gunman rather than obeying the natural instinct to run and hide.  Everyone should make like a white blood cell.  (And if many of them are armed, so much the better.  The last place groups of vulnerable children should be is in "gun free zones.")

5 comments:

Grim said...

Well, except, if anyone is armed and everyone else rushes the foe, you can't shoot the foe without hitting everyone else.

I mean, generally good advice, but really this is the sort of thing you should sort out in advance and as a team.

Miss Ladybug said...

Harrold ISD here in Texas has allowed teachers to carry in the classroom since 2008, if they follow a reasonable process. Heard the story on the radio this morning. This is a rural district and the superintendent understands that if something happens, law enforcement would be too far away. They won't say who or how many have gone through the process, but I think this is a reasonable answer to the very real threats that exist.

Russ said...

Cass mentioned this article also. I read it and came away thinking that she was just someone else willing to add restrictions to our rights. The tone of the article was better than most, but I took exception to there two parts.

She states, "I am okay with outlawing magazines that contain more than ten bullets." She then says that she is not sure that it would work. Why is she okay with it? Why the willingness to restrict a basic right?

and

Her logic is faulty when she states, "But I think there's no question that our homicide rate would be lower than it is now, simply because fewer killings would succeed." All available data points to the opposite being true.

RonF said...

You are going to have a hard time training people who think that defending them against crime is the government's responsibility, not theirs, that it's their responsibility to sacrifice themselves for the common good rather than cower and hope that the gunman won't come kill them.

Texan99 said...

True, but if we're going to try to influence the behavior of someone (via laws or persuasion), we'd do better to aim at the people we don't know in advance to be crazy or criminal. The ordinary people probably won't respond either, but some may, and at a lot better rate than the broken ones.