Daily Beast columnist Megan McArdle has figured it out.  The mass shooting problem.  We don’t have to debate it anymore.

In a long screed at the Daily Beast entitled “There’s Little We Can Do to Prevent Another Massacre”, McArdle goes through all the proposals out there — banning certain guns, taxing or banning ammunition, greater checks on the mentally ill, etc. — and basically rejects them all out of hand.  Why?  Because the Newtown shooter would have been successful anyway even if those laws and policies had been enacted.

This is crazy logic, and I’ve been reading it a lot lately.  Basically, what McArdle and others are saying is this: if a law or policy can’t stop all mass shootings, then there is no point in enacting it.  Case in point:

Reducing the body counts a bit is obviously a very worthy project; I am okay with outlawing magazines that contain more than ten bullets.  But this will in no way prevent people from going on murderous rampages.  We are not talking about an end to spree killing, only about a (perhaps) very slight reduction in its deadliness.

Can you imagine if that logic was applied to, say, automobile safety?  “Well, setting speed limits aren’t going to prevent ALL car accidents, so what’s the point of having speed limits at all?”.  Insanity, right?

McArdle is, of course, being the good libertarian (“government is not the answer”), but she takes this to a new level, virtually sneering at these ideas and saying it is “easy and satisfying to be for ‘gun control’ in the abstract, but we cannot pass gun control, in the abstract.”

After rejecting all the various proposals out there as insufficient, McArdle takes on the tired strawman… banning ALL guns, which nobody is seriously suggesting.

Self-conscious that she is doing the easy essay of poking holes in others’ solutions, McArdle forces herself to come with a solution of her own,  And here is where she gets crazy:

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.

So, in sum: the chances of achieving anything with any gun legislation are so low that in these circumstances, people should resign themselves to probable death by running at the person firing a gun in the hope that enough people will follow that their likely death will not be in vain.

“Would it work?” is sort of an odd question for McArdle to ask. (especially since her answer is “I have no idea”), but it makes me wonder exactly what her metric of success is.

I would say more, but what Jonathan Chait points out at NY Magazine is more than adequate:

Are you kidding me? You think gun control is impractical, so your plan is to turn the entire national population, including young children, into a standby suicide squad? Through private initiative, of course. It’s way more feasible than gun control!

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Unless I am missing a very subtle parody of libertarianism, McArdle’s plan to teach children to launch banzai charges against mass murderers is the single worst solution to any problem I have ever seen offered in a major publication… I award this essay no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Moreover, the Department of Homeland Security has specific guidelines on how to act when one’s life is threatened in a shooting situation. Objective 1 is to evacuate, and if you cannot evacuate, objective 2 is find a hiding place: “If evacuation is not possible, find a place to hide where the active shooter is less likely to find you.” DHS recommends that people take action against an active shooter only as a last resort and when your life is in imminent danger.

From the DHS manual:

That seems not only logical, but in line with human instinct.