How many times do you see someone taking a car and barrel it down a crowd with the purpose of killing everyone? I bet you - not many... You don't see it in the news, that someone snapped, decided to take a vehicle, and go on a rampage to kill people.
I'll grant you that - mass murder by vehicle is pretty rare. Generally, it's elderly people and unintentional (not murder). About a decade ago, a 90 year old mowed down about 30 people, killing 10 of them, with his car at the Santa Monica Farmer's market. A few weeks ago, an elderly man backed over a crowd of children in South LA, killing some of them, as they waited for ice cream.
You don't see it in the news that someone took a knife, and decided to kill 30 people. Yet you see it, time and time again, how people with guns go on shooting sprees like the one today.
Apparently you missed the news from China on Friday morning. An unemployed loser slashed 22 children and one adult outside an elementary school in China just as the children were arriving for Friday morning classes:
BEIJING -- A man with a knife slashed 22 children and one adult outside an elementary school in Henan province Friday morning, China's worst such incident in more than a year.
The attack was reminiscent of a spate of knife attacks on schoolchildren that took place across China in 2010. In most cases, the attackers were unemployed middle-aged men, leading to speculation that the assaults stemmed from economic and social discontent.
Friday's attack occurred at about 7:40 a.m. as children were arriving outside the gate of Chenpeng Village’s Wanquan Elementary School. The suspect, Min Yingjun, 36, allegedly slashed an elderly woman as well as the children. Local propaganda officials said later that Min had a psychological illness.
http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-man-slashes-22-children-near-china-school-20121214,0,6383015.story
Nobody died, but it wasn't for lack of effort. Of course, on Saturday, anti-gun crowd is trumpeting the absence of death in the Chinese school incident as proof that we'd be much better off with no guns because the maimed children in China didn't die:
http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-in-china-a-school-attackers-victims-are-injured-not-dead-20121215,0,3337695.story
I find it disturbing that all these gun advocates always resort to the excuse that the gun is just an object and that any other object could've been taken to commit the same act - and that it is about finding the sick people out there. The point is that it was not any other object, it was a gun - only because of the impact that it leaves behind.
Am I missing something here? It is the fascination with the gun in the first place and the fact that a person with a gun, that has had enough of society or whatever problems he/she has been having, has the ability to leave behind that gigantic psychological impact associated with going on a shooting rampage. Again, had there been no gun, then a fantasy to wipe everyone and their mother would have not become reality.
In the USA, we've gone soft on the mentally deranged. In most mass-murder cases, post-mortem investigation generally reveals plenty of clues that the person was mentally defective and should have been locked up to protect society. The lunatic who shot up the theatre (Dark Knight premiere) was one rare exception that trend. In most others, like the Tuscon incident (nearly killed Congresswoman Giffords), the shooter's mental problems were no secret. Society just didn't act on the available info and protect itself.
But instead, many focus on the weapon/object instead of the lunatic. Go ahead and make it even more difficult to obtain or keep a gun. The next lunatic who wants to slaughter children will simply fill a few glass jars with gasoline and once he's forced his way into the school and backed the children into a corner, he'll incinerate them with his molotov cocktails. Then you can bemoan the availablility of gasoline and glass jars.
Four airplanes were used to kill nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001. Why no calls to ban the airplane? 700 million people fly without incident in the USA every year on millions of flights, that's why. Yesterday, tragically, two or three guns out of hundreds of millions in the USA were used to slaughter some innocent children. And predictably, rather than focus on detecting and locking up the mental defectives, we once again hear about those terrible, scary guns. I guess once the guns are gone, we can dance in the streets every time a lunatic manages to kill or maim with something that's not a gun - and we can pat ourselves on the back for getting rid of the guns. No thanks. I'd rather we concentrate our efforts on detecting and incarcerating the mass-murderers before they slash 22 children with a knife or detonate a bomb.
One question: Friday's tragedy has nothing to do with a flight attendant who inadvertently tried to carry a gun thru an airport checkpoint, so why is the Newtown tragedy being discussed here? Why not in the water cooler?
