Megan McArdle says maybe bum rush the shooter, kids

Hmm. At the end of a long piece churning through the reasons that nothing really can happen to prevent these sorts of things and so it would be silly to try, Megan McArdle piped up with a paragraph that made her a laughingstock, yesterday:

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.

The idea of teaching children to bum rush a man with multiple guns in the hopes that they will be able to stop him before he shoots enough of them to prevent it seems ' surprising. (Especially after dismissing all the other possible ideas for maybe preventing violent crazy people from so easily getting their hands on enough weaponry to speedily take down a classroom or two of schoolchildren in the first place as being pipe dreams.) The problem with the "bum rush" plan is that the first person who tries it gets killed, and maybe the second and third as well, but what the hell?

Today she recognized the problem with this, and mounted a defense:

I completely agree that small children rushing a shooter would be a terrible idea. I can see how taken out of context, if you maybe hadn't read the whole article, "young people" could be read to refer to the Newtown school children.  But I was talking about teenagers, not first graders.

Well, all righty then.