Ladies and Gentlemen, freshman Texas congresscritter Kyle Kacal:

“I’ve heard of people being killed playing ping-pong — ping-pongs are more dangerous than guns,” he said. “Flat-screen TVs are injuring more kids today than anything.”

Seven people died playing ping-pong in Germany from 1997 through 2006. Cause of death is unknown.

And 169 kids died from falling flatscreens from 2000 through 2010.

Meanwhile, 2,793 kids died from gunfire in 2009 — 85 of them preschoolers.

[via Weigel]

“It’s like OPEC. We’re not producing all the maple syrup in the world. But by producing 70 to 78 percent, we have the ability to adjust the quantity that is in the marketplace.” —Simon Trépanier, acting general manager of the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers. [NYT]

Our guest columnist is NRO contributor Charlotte Allen.

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.

Newtown Answers [NRO]

A truly horrible human being:

Our guest columnist is in deep shit.

The National Rifle Association of America is made up of four million moms and dads, sons and daughters – and we were shocked, saddened and heartbroken by the news of the horrific and senseless murders in Newtown.

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And now, for a minute or two, Stinque Department of FurBabies presents something to take your mind off all the shit in the world.

Bulldog Puppy for Benedick:

Existentialist Cats and Jumping Bunnies if you click through! Read more »

Our guest columnist manages to go 681 words without mentioning “well-regulated”.

It is easy, and in moments of despair such as Friday quite understandable, to scream “more” to gun control, “more” to the morass of airport-style security that is spreading its way across our institutions, “more” to the diagnosis and institutionalization of the mentally ill. But it is much harder to write the laws that would have guaranteed Adam Lanza could never find a gun, or enter a school by force, or go without what diagnosis, treatment, and supervision he might have needed. And hardest of all to write them in such a way that the republic we’d be left with would still look like America in the ways we value most.

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