Preposterous Explanations for Newtown - NYTimes.com Beyond the abstraction of evil, we may never know why Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children, six school officials and then himself in Newtown last Friday. And there can never be a satisfactory answer to the question "how could this happen?" (Although all-too-easy access to guns is certainly part of the answer. As Mayor Bloomberg put it, "It's so unbelievable and it only happens in America. And it happens again and again."). Yet in the last week, many have tried to untangle the issues behind the massacre, sometimes in truly preposterous ways. Charlotte Allen, writing for The National Review Online: There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K-6 school), all the personnel-the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the 'reading specialist'-were female. There didn't even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza's knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school's public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak-but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. 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. Ed. note: Ms. Allen doesn't actually have her facts straight. Mike Huckabee, on Fox News: We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage? [W]e've made it a place where we don't want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability-that we're not just going to have be accountable to the police if they catch us, but one day we stand before, you know, a holy God in judgment. If we don't believe that, then we don't fear that. Ed. note: The killer was not associated with the school. Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America: Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to insure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. This tragedy underscores the urgency of getting rid of gun bans in school zones.The only thing accomplished by gun free zones is to insure that mass murderers can slay more before they are finally confronted by someone with a gun. Ed. note: Via Mother Jones, "attempts by armed civilians to intervene in shooting rampages are rare-and are successful even more rarely."