Shut Up and Learn to Die With It

Apropos of my last post, Meeegan McArdle has raised her empty head and spewed the following:

Lanza seems to have been fond of violent video games, and spent hours playing them.

What does this even mean?  Hours per what?  Day?  Week?  Lifetime?  And McArdle offers no evidence, no link, to support her claim.  The linked WSJ article says he was a frequent customer at GameStop; it does not disclose his purchases. The claim appears to derive from a couple of U.K. e-rags (not cited by McArdle) which offer no source for the assertion.

Based on that alone, the Deadly Beast has committed media malpractice and deserves to disappear from the face of the web.

Of course, there's more.

Lanza tried and failed to buy a gun, presumably for use in the attack.  Lanza's mother seems to have been the registered owner of the guns he had, and may have been killed to get her guns. 

Again, no proof of any of this.  Reports from authorities are that Mrs. Lanza was found in her bed with multiple gunshot wounds to her head from one of her own guns.  Yet McArdle wants her readers to believe that Mrs. Lanza's son dispatched her by some means not involving a firearm, then gained access her guns and desecrated her corpse with a few rounds to the head.  

More:

Lanza shot everyone at least three times, according to the medical examiner.  If anyone tried to play dead, a commonly recommended strategy, it didn't work.  

If only those 6 and 7 year olds had thought strategically.  And, again, the reports are to the contrary.

McArdle claims it "br[oke] my heart to even type those details."  Imagine how she'd feel if she'd tried for accuracy.

She also omits other details, such as Mrs. Lanza's trips to the shooting range to encourage her  troubled son to handle lethal weaponry.  All in all, McArdle appears to be making large parts of the story up for her own purpose -- which is to argue against gun regulation.

You see, Adam Lanza was not only an "anxious sad sack" but also an unstoppable killing machine:

He had all the mental health resources he needed [sic] -- and he did it anyway. The law stopped him from buying a gun [sic] --and he did it [sic] anyway. The school had an intercom system aimed at stopping unauthorized entry -- and he did it anyway.

And if you can't stop one particular person, then there's no reason to even try to pass a law which might address some other circumstance.  Just shut the fuck up and learn to play dead.

We couldn't, for instance, make it a crime for a person licensed to own or carry a firearm to provide access to a weapon to a person who wasn't licensed to do so, or a minor, or an incompetent person.  We couldn't also legislate civil penalties, and impose liability, for such a thing.  (The right to keep and bear arms includes the right to give them away to any felon or nut - look it up.)  We tried something like that with vehicles, and no unlicensed person or minor was ever deterred from driving because of such laws.  Never happened; never will.  

Meeegan knows that won't work, so she doesn't even mention it.

But she is generous enough to offers a solution that don't interfere with her libertarian pals'  holy jollies.

My guess is that we're going to get a law anyway, and my hope is that it will consist of small measures that might have some tiny actual effect, like restrictions on magazine capacity.  I'd also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.  Would it work?  Would people do it?  I have no idea; all I can say is that both these things would be more effective than banning rifles with pistol grips [sic].  

You know, with this new fangled social networking, I'd bet it's just as easy to round up a flash mob of bum rushers as it is to gather a group of libertarian tw*ts to prance around the Jefferson Memorial. 

We can also slash public education budgets even further, so any future Adam Lanza will think twice before risking the risk the wrath of an overcrowded classroom.  

Profit!