Christmas is over. For the families of 20 slain children in Connecticut, it’s been the first without their late loved ones, with the grief all too real and far too near.

It’s been just more than ten days since Adam Lanza burst into the Sandy Hook elementary school and shot at everything that moved. Along with the 20 murdered children – innocent souls snatched from this life with startling and harrowing viciousness – Lanza claimed seven adult victims. He also killed himself. At times like this it seems that sanity will never return, and never so much as in the days immediately following the outrage.

But eventually sanity must return. And as we now look back we must not only examine the madness of the original shooting, but also attempt to reconcile the emotion-drenched madness of the reactions to it.

There’s a lot to reconcile. For now, I’m going to limit myself to just two examples.

On December 19, National Review Online published a retrospective featuring observations by a number of individuals. Among them was The Human Christ author Charlotte Allen, who wrote the following:

“There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred.

...More >>