No, the problem at Sandy Hook wasn't the lack of men

Megan McArdle thinks that gun-control measures wouldn't accomplish much but that training kids to run at a shooter instead of away might. That's a weird payoff at the end of a 4,500-word post, but it's not as offensive as Charlotte Allen's argument:

There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. . . . 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.

Well, he probably would have shot them dead. Just like he killed principal Dawn Hochsprung, who (as Allen half-acknowledges in a side point) acted heroically in trying to stop Lanza. Unmentioned by Allen: the several other Sandy Hook faculty and staff members who died not running for their lives but actively trying to protect students from the shooter.

Allen's contention that these people might have stopped the shooter if only they hadn't been so female is incredibly stupid. (I hope I would have acted as they did, but I suspect I would have been too petrified to move.) And it dishonors the heroism of the women who died in Newtown.

I'll let Dianna Anderson take it from here.