There’s Always This
Why stop the shooter when you can just give every kid a bullet proof blankie? No word yet on the release date of the bomb defusing teddy bears.
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I’m not so sure that would even work. Bullet-proof vests basically catch the bullet like catching a ball in a net. But the kinetic energy–and there’s gonna be a fair amount of it–has to go somewhere. So getting shot wearing one is pretty much like getting kicked by a mule, or at least so I’m told. I have my doubts that a baby or little kid would be likely to survive that.Report
Okay. Now that I’ve actually looked at it so I know what I’m talking about, I can see where that could work. Maybe. But it doesn’t seem very blanket-y. More like a yoga mat or something.
But now I’m envisioning an armored baby stroller…Report
Good lord. What’s weird about this is…
Wait. Let me start again.
One of the many things that’s really weird about this is that in their own picture, all the kids are completely exposed to any mass shooter who happens to be wandering the hall all the kids are in.
They’re the Maginot Blankets.Report
We’ve given up on that. The best we can do at this point is minimize the damage. It’s like McArdle said so long ago, advice from a wise woman no one heeded: we need to train our seven year olds to rush the shooter. That’s the only solution.Report
Not that she said that. Not that it matters that she didn’t say that. She’s Megan McArdle. It was decided that she said it.Report
Dude, I can pull up quotes where she said that.
That you view it differently doesn’t shake my belief that she actually said those words.
Why people defend her is beyond me, actually. She’s prolly the sloppiest thinker who presents themselves as BIG THINKER that I’ve ever read.Report
To add on that, I remember the first go-round about this with Hanley taking point on defending McArdle’s post on “rushing the shooter”, and you were part of the defense. Back then I thought you were all crazy. One person even said (if I’m remembering correctly, and I’ll check if needed) that I should read the article with more “charity”, which I understood at the time to mean “putting words in another person’s mouth.”
I’m generally shy about that.Report
I’m not denying that she advocated rushing the shooter. I’m denying that she ever said that seven year olds should do so. That was inferred by her critics, and became Truth afterwards.
She said “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.”
In the same piece, she discarded the notion that in the specific case of Sandy Hook a bunch of primary school students would have successfully stopped Lanza from reloading.
Then, after the blowback she clarified what she meant “I completely agree that small children rushing a shooter would be a terrible idea.”
But since this is Megan McArdle, eighteen months later we are hearing that she advocated a bunch of seven year olds rushing shooters. I defend her in part because I cannot imagine being held to such malicious standards.Report
One other hing Will. I’m actually pretty pissed off that you’d think my dislike for McArdle comes from some form of group think. I certainly don’t view myself as being a “liberal borg-bot” and I think my comments here at OT have demonstrated at slight deviation from the Party Line. If not more. I’d’ve thought you , of all people, would realize that.Report
But since this is Megan McArdle
What does that claim even mean Will? Is there something other than the “McArdleness” of those posts that people object to? What could it be? Reverse sexism?
People like me dislike McArdle because she’s a sloppy thinker. How can a I say that in a way you’ll understand without my words being interpreted as an inexplicable code where my my saying that isn’t interpreted as “well, of course, since this is Megan McArdle”?Report
I apologize for associating you with groupthink. It honestly matters less to me whether her critics came to this conclusion and stuck by it independently or by bouncing off one another. It matters more that it’s still there all this time later, and that I cannot mention her name or link to her without conversations gearing towards how terrible she is (not just how she’s wrong). And in this case, nobody even needed to mention her.
As you mention, I don’t find the notion of rushing a shooter to be remotely as outrageous as you do. In articulating it, I might have worded things in such a way that people could interpret it to mean that I favor throwing grade schoolers at men with guns. That is the other reason that this particular thing sets me off.Report
I do think sexism is an issue. I’m not the only one. But I don’t think it’s an issue with you in particular. It’s mostly that it dislike reaches a tipping point so that everything a person says or does is interpreted in such a way as further proof of their deficiency. (I’ve done this myself in my personal life.)
That particular interpretation, despite initial ambiguity (at most) and the clarification, and its persistence over time seems indicative to me that this goes beyond an impersonal appraisal of whether she is a sloppy thinker. It goes towards thinking that she is the sort of person that actually advocates grade schoolers rushing men with guns, and whose protestations to the contrary cannot be trusted.Report
As you mention, I don’t find the notion of rushing a shooter to be remotely as outrageous as you do.
So you think we should train up our seven year olds – like put them thru drills and have them engage in practical applications of how tiny people en masse can subdue a grown adult before he kills them all, even tho he would quite likely hirt or haorm the instigators of the rushing – as part of the culture we live in?
Really?Report
It goes towards thinking that she is the sort of person that actually advocates grade schoolers rushing men with guns, and whose protestations to the contrary cannot be trusted.
Will, she did advocate that grade schoolers rush the men with guns, and her protestations to the contrary are in direct contradiction to the words she initially wrote.Report
No. I do not. Neither does Megan McArdle (“[S]mall children rushing a shooter would be a terrible idea.”)
I guess it is clarifying to know that, with you at least, one does not have to be Megan McArdle to have to clarify that by advocating people rushing shooters one is not necessarily advocating seven year olds doing so. Hopefully, though, you will believe me and I won’t be hearing eighteen months from now about how I advocate seven year olds rushing men with guns.Report
Where did she say that? What I quoted said nothing about seven year olds or small children rushing shooters. It said people and young people. In case there was any confusion on the latter, she clarified not small children shortly thereafter. I do not see the contradiction.Report
How bout this Will/ Can we agree that McArdle is either lying or being an incredibly sloppy thinker when she denies she advocated for seven year olds to rush the shooter? Either way, I’m cool.Report
even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.
8-12 are their ages.Report
Reading the links and quotes Will provided I don’t see anywhere where McArdle said young kids should rush the shooter. She seems to say that in general if shooters were rushed by their intended targets it’d turn out poorly for them but she does specify that in Sandy Hook specifically that would have been a terrible idea. Do you have a quote where McArdle is saying what you say she has said Still?Report
If I may jump into the fray, @will-truman and @stillwater . I don’t know much about McArdle. I’ve understood her to be a bit of a punch line and from what little I’ve seen of her she doesn’t strike me as the most serious of thinkers.
That said, provided she hasn’t offered more than what Will has quoted here, I don’t think it is fair to say that she said 7-year-olds should rush shooters. Her advice remains irresponsible — she doesn’t seem capable of penning a piece like what Mad Rocket Scientist did which would actually prove the least bit helpful to people — and her choice of the term “young people” in the wake of a shooting that left elementary school children dead shows a remarkable display of “not fucking getting it”. But her clarification should suffice in noting that she doesn’t seem to actually think 7-year-olds should rush shooters.
She strikes me as the sort of person who has said enough wrong things to criticize her that strawmanning her is simply unnecessary.Report
What happens when you look at all those other supposedly wrong things and find them to be strawmanning as well?Report
@j-r
Maybe she shouldn’t be criticized then.
To focus on this issue (because, again, I don’t really know much about her), there is enough within the quote Will offered to criticize that attacking her for what she might have implied seems like overkill.
She shouldn’t be giving out advice on how to respond to a shooter. She shouldn’t have used the phrase “young people” — at least not without qualifying what she meant. There is enough meat there.Report
So I just scanned the article and — well — it appears to be an article about Newton and Adam Lanza; at least those topics get mentioned much. And her big answer to shootings like these? Simple, to gang rush the shooter.
So, what is the reader supposed to gather from that mental stew? Seriously?
Look, there is no way to put out an article like that and not have people say, “Holy crap W-T-F those were kids!”
So she walks back the comments. Fine. She is smart enough to know that adorable little kids smaller than the shooter’s left leg would not bring him down. Yay her.
That article was inept.Report
Veronica, it’s about preventing school shootings more generally. Sandy Hook was the most recent that she talks about first, but it was something of an outlier in terms of the age of the victims. In the same piece she said the (young) children rushing wouldn’t have done any good in Sandy Hook in particular.
At most, it was unclear (though I read it as she intended it). She then clarified.Report
What happens when you look at all those other supposedly wrong things and find them to be strawmanning as well?
You stop cherry-picking.Report
I actually have a lot more respect for McCardle than most people on my side of the aisle seem to. I mean, she’s a pundit and writes the way pundits do, and sometimes she does so sloppily. But generally, I find her thoughtful from what I’ve read by her, although I’m only an occasional reader. I first realized she was thoughtful and not the conservative caricature some want to make her out to be when I read the following article she wrote several years ago: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/if-i-were-a-poor-black-kid/249996/
And frankly, I often say things very clumsily and have to clarify. And unlike McCardle, I (and some of her critics here at OT) write anonymously and therefore have to take less responsibility for my fish ups than she does.
To the issue at hand, writing “young people” was sloppy writing. Not in my opinion sloppy thinking, but sloppy writing, but others’ mileage varies and I’ll cede the point if I have to. She shouldn’t have written that in the context in which she was writing. And I can see how that can lead to misinterpretations. But she did clarify what she meant. And that’s good enough for me.Report
To add on that, I remember the first go-round about this with Hanley taking point on defending McArdle’s post on “rushing the shooter”,
Yes, for reasons that Will pointed out.
One person even said (if I’m remembering correctly, and I’ll check if needed) that I should read the article with more “charity”, which I understood at the time to mean “putting words in another person’s mouth.”
Hmmm, have you ever suggested that someone was reading someone else’s words uncharitably?Report
Having thought it over, I want to reinforce my earlier apology to @stillwater which I fear sounded too non-apology apology. He and I are never going to be close to seeing eye-to-eye here, and I strongly disagree with his reading of that piece. That does not, however, excuse that I was unfair to him, taking my frustration with the author’s critics more generally and applying it to him personally. That wasn’t what I intended to do, but it was what I did.Report
I thought the same thing when I saw the picture.
This looked completely ineffective.
My very liberal friends on facebook had all sorts of reactions to this idea though. All of them in the range of sadness to despair to anger.Report
I like to think I’m pretty jaded. It takes a lot to render me speechless in slackjawed amazement at the utter strangeness, tainted with a bit of horror, of what I’m seeing.
Today, I’ve seen two such things. You’ll have to wait until next week to get my report on the other.Report
A product like this should not exist in a civilized country. Than I remember that I live in the United States.Report
You can see that these things are “wearable” on the back. I think they might be good in a situation where the kids are fleeing away from an active shooter, say leaving through an exit and possibly exposing them to fire from behind, or in the case of protecting them from flying debris in a tornado or hurricane. However, it’s my understanding that the current policies are for kids to “huddle in place”. Not sure how effective that would be with this “blanket” if the active shooter entered a classroom to find these kids hiding under blankets. The shooter could simply pull these things off the kids, rendering them useless. Not to mention that an easy end round this device is a pipe bomb or some other explosive like a Molotov cocktail.
From the company site: “Bodyguard™ blanket is composed of two advanced ballistic materials that provide a level of protection consistent with the Level llla, National Institute of Justice (NIJ) standard. This standard is commonly used for law enforcement body armor in the United States of America.” So this standard, from Wikipedia is as follows: “New armor protects against 8.1 g (125 gr) .357 SIG FMJ Flat Nose (FN) bullets at a velocity of 448 m/s ± 9.1 m/s (1470 ft/s ± 30 ft/s) and 15.6 g (240 gr) .44 Magnum Semi Jacketed Hollow Point (SJHP) bullets at a velocity of 436 m/s (1430 ft/s ± 30 ft/s)…… It also provides protection against most handgun threats, as well as the threats mentioned in [Types I, IIA, and II].”
Type III , which is a step above IIIa, “Conditioned armor protects against 9.6 g (148 gr) 7.62×51mm NATO M80 ball bullets at a velocity of 847 m/s ± 9.1 m/s (2780 ft/s ± 30 ft/s). It also provides protection against the threats mentioned in [Types I, IIA, II, and IIIA].” So I’m not sure if this “blanket” would be 100% effective in stopping a .223 round. The Buzzfeed article said the blanks stopped 12 gauge buckshot and 9MM rounds. But as Road Scholar said, penetration is not necessarily the only problem, but the force associated from the bullet’s impact.
The blankets are a grand each. For a school of 500 that’s 500K. Seems that kind of money could better be spent on other security measures.Report
I’ll second Damon, this is crap meant to be sold to uninformed school admins & anxious parents.
And no, it would not stop any supersonic round, which is every rifle except the .22LR. The only wearable armor that stops rifle rounds are made from ceramic plates, are heavy, cost more, and can only stop 2 or three rounds before they stop being effective.Report
I would hope to teach my kid to run the fish away rather than line up to get her blankie.
* I’m perfectly willing to believe I’m being hopelessly naive and that there are in fact plenty of shootings wherein a kid is trapped in a room but nevertheless has time and opportunity to go to where the blankies are stored and get properly outfitted.Report