Today National Review published an op-ed piece by Charlotte Allen, in which she contends that a male presence in Sandy Hook Elementary School could have prevented much of the slaughter:
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… 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.
This is asinine. As far as I can tell, there is no evidence that Dawn Hochsprung, the principal who attempted to charge Lanza, failed in her attempt because of her feminine weakness. She failed because Lanza had semi-automatic weapons and she did not. Suggesting that a male former football player could have fared better against multiple bullets is farcical, and wishing that some of the larger school children would have physically accosted the shooter borders on sociopathic.