It might be comical to watch right wingers attempting to come up with talking points to spin the atrocities in Newtown, if the subject wasn’t so horrible. Some of their suggestions for dealing with the issues of gun violence are so absurd, though, that you just have to laugh. To keep from sobbing.

Today’s case in point — libertarian Megan McArdle, now writing for the Daily Beast, who dismisses all forms of gun control and comes up with this howler of a solution instead: children should be trained to “gang rush shooters.”

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.

Oh, good grief. This is where the leading intellects of the right wing have ended up — in such total fatalism that the best thing they can suggest is for kindergarten students to be trained to commit mass suicide when gunmen enter their classrooms. Astounding.

And we thought Power Line’s ridiculous suggestion to make schools more like biker bars was bad. What the hell is wrong with these people?