courtesy bbc.com

Think it’s hard to buy a gun in San Francisco? New York? You’re right, it is. Because it’s far too dangerous to allow guns in the hands of individuals. Easy access to firearms leads to “gun violence” and even mass killings. Just ask our friends who toil away in the cause of civilian disarmament. And if you think it’s difficult putting your hands on a heater in certain US coastal backwaters, imagine how hard it is in, say, southern China. Merely attempting to secure one is probably enough to get yourself thrown in a labor or reeducation camp. Yet somehow mass killings still happen there, too. From bbc.com: “An attack by knife-wielding men at a train station in Kunming in south-west China, has left at least 27 dead, the state news agency Xinhua says. Nothing is known so far about the motivation behind the attack, in which 109 people are said to have been hurt.” . . .

Got that? About 130 people in a crowded train station. Seconds counted and the secret police were only minutes away. The “knife-wielding men” who planned the attack (no doubt making use of high-capacity assault knives bought via the internet) were surely counting on the fact that none of their intended victims would be able to put up any kind of armed resistance. Translation: no good guy with a gun. Probably no one with so much as a knife either, as packing one in the Middle Kingdom is likely outlawed, too.

Of course, here’s only one rational, common sense response to this kind of carnage: tough, meaningful knife control. Registration of all blades in excess of four inches, those with finger grooves or a choil. Destruction or confiscation of cutting tools that don’t meet those limits. But you just know that, as always, other more enlightened countries – those tranquil places where people can walk the streets free of the fear of senseless, random knife violence – will be out in front of the US in this critical area. If only we were open-minded enough to learn from their example.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

109 COMMENTS

  1. http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/02/28/Chinese-Report-Cherry-Picks-Gun-Laws-To-Paint-U-S-As-Violent-Dangerous

    Chinese Report Cherry-Picks Gun Stats to Paint U.S. as Violent

    On February 28th, in response to human rights reports “issued by the U.S. State Department” on February 27th, China released a report describing the U.S. as a country where “gun violence is rampant.”

    China focused on the number of guns privately held in the U.S.–“about 300 million”–and criticized the U.S. government for “[failing] to take effective measures to control guns.” However, they cited numbers from 2013 when those numbers benefited their thesis and numbers from 2012 when those benefited the thesis even more.

    According to Sina.com, the report used 2013 crime numbers to show “firearms were used in 69.3 percent of [U.S.] murders, 41 percent of robberies, and 21.8 percent of aggravated assaults.” If they had juxtaposed 2013 with 2012, they would have realized what Breitbart News reported on February 19th–that as gun ownership rose exponentially in the first half of 2013, FBI crime statistics demonstrate violent crime dropped drastically.

    The Chinese also cited Attorney General Eric Holder “as saying the average number of mass shooting incidents has tripled in recent years.” But here again, professors who study “mass shootings” for a living say this simply is not so.

    For example, Northeastern University Criminologist James Alan Fox said, “Many times more youngsters are killed annually in bicycle accidents” than in “mass shootings.” And on February 1st, Breitbart News reported a study by AG Holder’s own DOJ showing firearm-related murders are down 39 percent since 1993, and violent crime is down 70 percent.

    Far from criticizing U.S. gun ownership and/or the absence of more stringent gun control laws, the Chinese have indicated that the U.S. is living proof of the maxim “More guns, less crime.”

    Click thru the Breitbart link some great links to useful data.

    • The more the Chinese think we’re a bunch of trigger happy cowboys with more guns and balls than brains the better IMHO.

      • The Chinese government is deathly afraid of their own people having guns, as all socialists governments are. Given that, how afraid do you think they are of us?

        • Um, given they also have thermonuclear devices?

          Probably not very. Or at any rate, the Chinese leadership is much more likely to be afraid of their own population than of us.

          Seriously, think about why they continue to provoke US allies. The feelings of nationalism that are aroused are a means to moderate unrest and anger over bogged-down reform efforts, the slowing Chinese economy and large-and-growing economic disparities.

    • After the Stockton CA school yard massacre Bush 41 banned the importation of certain firearms that included the AK47 variants. The next 8 homicides were stabbings in St. Louis MO.

      In 2006 my daughter was stabbed 44 times…..it ain’t guns….in China or here!

        • Oh, no! There’s no more to say that hasn’t been said a million times already. The disarmed are the enslaved. Welcome to “America”, the Land Without Balls.

  2. It’s so dangerous here in the US because of guns that people from all over the known universe (and several parts of the universe that are unknown) are paying to be smuggled in to the country by boxcar, boat, inflatable raft, swim fins . . . .

  3. Was treyvon martin’s long lost brother killed? Nothing to see here then. & nothing for the brady’s to care about.

  4. The grabbers then usually counter with “if these attackers had had guns, it would have been much worse.”

    They don’t care about the victims. For the grabbers it’s just a number game and a power trip.

  5. IIRC one of those Chinese knife -wielders did in about 20 school kids just about the same time Adam Lanza did in Connecticut. That one didn’t get much press either.

    • That guy wounded the kids and didn’t kill any. They did have some hideous wounds. Now gas can man in China killed 46 people with a high capacity ghost assault gas can within a few months of the knife attack.

    • Also happened just prior to Sandy Hook, and the two were heavily compared, most of the emotionally and wrongly affected ones declaring that “none of the people in China died” (it was a knife attack in a school but “only” 27 were wounded). Thus COMPLETELY missing the point, as if China was such a better place to live in with knife attacks instead of the so-called and politically-loaded “gun violence”.

    • None of this is even a rounding error in the universe of actual statistics.

      Over 1 million killed by machetes and suchlike in Rwanda over the course of months, not that long ago. More than can be attributed to “gun violence” (excluding suicide) in the USA for the entirety of the last 50 years. Any bets that each and every one of those victims wished they had a gun to defend themselves before the tragic end of their own personal knife fight?

      • Bring up sub Saharan Africa, but fail to mention the astronomical amount of AIDS deaths? Machetes ain’t got nothin on the amount of people killed by disease, both blood-borne and insect-borne. Between HIV/AIDS & mosquitoes, hand held weapons aren’t even a drop in the bucket, but we only want to focus on a very small kind of weapon. Hardly helping at all, no matter how you look at it.

  6. Whenever I go back to China, I always bring a knife. I bring a cold steel, tough but relatively cheap so if it does end up getting confiscated, not much of a loss. I see plenty of people in China with knives carried on their body though they are usually job oriented but at the same time, some of them have a tiny pocket knife for fruit, cleaning finger nails, opening packages, etc. I’ve gone through security check points with the knife clipped in my pocket and I never got any trouble. Even if there are laws, I’m still gonna be packing.

    • Interesting to hear from someone who actually goes to China. If they do confiscate it, you don’t get other grief?

      • Honestly have no idea. Being a tourist, I think they will at most just confiscate it considering I haven’t done anything wrong. I mainly use it just like how I use my knife here in the states, it’s a utility knife and will be used in SD in worst case scenarios. If I do end up using it there, if there was a legit reason, I don’t think there will be too many issues but then again the courts in China suck ass.

  7. What’s interesting is that buried in the last paragraph is an offhand remindr that mass knife attacks are not uncommon in China….

    • Tell that to the twenty or so children that were injured by a lone knifeman at school in china shortly after sandyhook.

    • I think that a term like ‘very common’ would be more appropriate than ‘not uncommon’. I don’t pay much attention to the local Chinese news, but it seems like I hear about mass knife attacks a couple of times a year.

  8. “reedcation camp.”

    This was the reason the hyphen got invented. It won’t be a REEDucation camp. It’s a RE-education camp!

    Except it’s worse. You wrote “reedcation”. Far effing out.

    • It was a group of mofo’s, apparently, but yeah, still.

      If I had to choose a way to be on the losing side of a murderous rampage, I’d take a gun shot over death-by-slash-attack any day.

      ‘Course above both of those, I’d choose to be armed and have a chance to defend myself.

      • For much of human history stabby/slashey is the way that violent, unnatural deaths occured. Romans, Mongols…….

        • I’d rather be shot than stabbed or deeply cut, no doubt.

          And, I’d rather be stabbed or deeply cut than shot with an arrow.

          You ever see what an arrow with a good broadhead can do? Not pretty.

          • OK, if radicals are allowed to horn in on the thread, I’d prefer to be neither shot at nor shat at. So I do my best to not give the people I meet a reason to want to shoot at me or shit at me. 🙂

            There’s a line in “A Child’s Garden of Grass, a pre-legalization comedy:” One of the methods of acquiring marijuana by receiving it as a gift is to (spoken in a Hindu guruish sing-song voice) “Be very, very nice to everyone you meet.” That’s right after “Be a beautiful girl with large breasts.”

        • I think I might throw shit at someone trying to stab or shoot me. I used to pitch in little league and still got pretty good aim. Would you risk getting warm shit in your mouth for a chance to kill me? This is what ziplocs were made for. Lock in the freshness.

  10. Four inch limit??? A flight attendants throat was slashed with a box cutter. A one inch blade can do terrible damage in the hands of well trained assailant.

  11. it sounds like China needs more gun control. as almost any democrat would tell you, guns are the root of all violence.

    mayors against guns will be adding 27 names to their list of victims of “gun violence” in America.

  14. Those pussy legislators in Rhode Island supposedly keep trying to save the population by clamping down on their knife length. Just in a short number of years, they’ve gone from 4″ down to 3.75 to 3.25 and they are now down to 3″ in length.

    Truth be told, if the population there ever woke up out its delirium, they’d realize that it wasn’t for the people’s safety but the safety of the legislature, once the people realized how bad the corrupt legislature was screwing them. What was once a staunch example of colonial resistance has now turned into a population of sheep.

  15. What, not one kung-fu master in the whole crowd? I figured one pajama clad comrade could have taken out the whole lot of them, without a gun or knife. My whole Kung-Fu Theater view of China is shattered.

    • Damn you! I was going to stereotype that! *shakes fist while weeping*.
      But seriously, I thought at the very least some genetic memory or something would kick in and it would look like a Jet Li movie. 1.3+ Billion sheeple and no- one knows kung fu?! I suppose the Chinese are like seals, except they don’t get to see a nice club before they die.

    • Kung-Fu in China? Don’t make me laugh! They are all cowed, disarmed SERFS. Except for the bold, the criminals….

  16. And in China, occasionally they have a derranged person light up a gallon milk jug filled with gas on a bus and will kill twice that many innocent people. It isn’t the weapon, it is the crazy.

    • Ginsus are Japanese, aren’t they?

      In Japan, they attack with searing radiation, not knives.

      • Ginsu knives were originally made in Fremont, Ohio. They are as Japanese as Smith & Wesson.

        • Now watch for S&W use that to market to the Japanophile/otaku crowd. “As Japanese as Ginsu knives!”

    • YOU DON’T NEED MORE THAN 4 INCHES TO CUT LETTUCE! Dyslectic vegans of the world untie!

  20. Most of the mass killings in China are carried out not by street criminals or terrorists, but by the government, which leads the world by far in that statistic. An armed populace would be a real contradiction in a place like that.

    I’m not opposed to capital punishment, except for the reason the Chinese government does it.

    • Their “One Child Policy” isn’t working out too well for them either. The serfs are dying faster than they can be bred.

  22. So far this is getting about 1/10,000th of the Sandy Hook coverage. This will be massively ignored by the US gun grabbers because there are no evil AR-15s and “high capacity clips.” Another tragic loss, and it’s not possible to eliminate edge weapons, even in prisons. The same thing could happen here, but hopefully a good CCW carrier could step in.

  23. It is interesting to me that you forgot to mention that it was not a single person, but at least ten people in an organized attack. You also seemed to have missed the fact that the police were able to stop the attack by shooting the terrorists. (Because the police were armed, and the attackers were not.)

    I can see how you might have missed these two important pieces of information, since they totally invalidate your entire argument.

    • Well, allow me to retort.

      At least twice in his post Dan referenced knife-wielding “men.” Men is plural. More than one. Also, the number of attackers was not referenced in the bbc story, past saying four were dead, one captured and “other” on the run. I had to google to find other stories that referenced ten.

      Second, thank god the attackers weren’t armed. Wait, no… THEY WERE, WITH KNIVES AND MACHETES. How can you possibly think that not having a gun means being unarmed? Yes, the police were able to shoot them…eventually. You know, after they had killed and wounded scores of people. While “unarmed” with knives.

      I fail to see how your two “facts” invalidate anything. Evil people attacked a disarmed populace and did great damage until the police showed up. Once meeting armed resistance they were either killed or ran away.

      Let me ask you a question. Had you been on the train platform, would you have wanted to be unarmed, ‘unarmed’ with a knife, or armed with a concealed handgun? I know my first and second choices, but maybe you’d prefer to wait patiently for the police and hope they killed everyone else before they got to you.

      On a side note, I’m rethinking my support for the “no flaming” policies on TTAG. Some posters really just need to be called rude names. Just saying.

    • Dave, your claims (really your ignorance as to the facts) don’t invalidate the thesis of the article. Fact is, on average, if there were armed civilians the data indicate odds are the attack would have ended even sooner and with less fatalities.

      Look, there is some dispute as to why killers pick disarmed or gun free areas. Sometimes they pick them because they are gun free, more often they pick them because they are places they know.

      But WHEN they do pick a place that is gun free, the fatalities are higher. If they are attacking with a knife the fatalities are higher, and if they are attacking with a gun their fatalities against the innocent are higher.

      The point is your fixation on means (guns) is absurd.

    • I appreciate your efforts, Dave, but this is the all guns, all the time crowd. The fact that it took the efforts of a team of organized men to accomplish with knives what single nut job can do with a single gun doesn’t register here.

      • Nordic, The single nut job will have a gun regardless of the laws. After all, murder is illegal. The single honest man with a gun can stop the single nutjob or the group of knife armed nutjobs.

        Yes, we are the all gun all the time crowd. The crowd you want is the all victims all the time crowd.

        Hello, low budget dave, been a while since you posted here. Isn’t it exciting that illinois and now california are going to have to start issuing concealed carry permits? We live in heady times. Freedom breaking out all over for Americans.

        • JWM,

          I still read the site from time to time, I just don’t usually post. Although some people in the comments section are polite and knowledgeable, most of them just repeat the same old tired arguments.

          “If it were you, wouldn’t you rather have a gun?” Sure. I would also rather have wings, so I could fly to work. The fact is that I don’t bring my gun to work, so I would have been unarmed anyway.

          “Knives are just as bad as guns, so why don’t we regulate knives?” That is a silly argument, and you know it. Knives require force, proximity, and the willingness to get messy. Guns can be used at a remote distance, even by a child.

          “An armed population is a polite population.” No it isn’t. An armed population is a random and dangerous population. In America, we are bristling with guns, and yet hundreds of people have died in “stand your ground” defenses. About 20% of all the “polite” people killed in Florida using SYG are children. Even if you assume that every claim of SYG is valid, it still makes us much less polite than say, Australia.

          “Killers pick unarmed victims”. Oh please. Our murder rate is about four times higher than China or Australia. There is no way to prevent all murder, but we can certainly make it a lot tougher.

          Because of their history of repression and government control, mass murder in China requires a lot of planning and hard work. In the U.S., all it requires is a trip to the gun store. That doesn’t mean that I am advocating repression and government control, I am just pointing out that the argument about “high-capacity assault knives bought via the internet” is absurd and obviously wrong.

          No, we can’t prevent all murder. We can’t even prevent all mass murder. But we could make it a lot more rare if we wanted to. The fact is, we don’t want to. We care more about our guns than we do about cutting back on the number of mass killings.

          It is a sad fact about America, and one of the reasons I rarely comment here.

          As far as other states issuing more licenses to carry guns, that hardly matters. Even if California were to make all guns illegal, people could just carry them in from some other state. It is not like we have any national laws that are even worth mentioning. In the absence of a national law, I would just as soon own a gun as well.

          Since you are already forming the question: yes. I would rather be free than repressed. I would rather own a gun than not. But I would be willing to submit to a universal background check for every gun transaction if it would cut down on the amount of gun violence.

          Yet every time America considers any national regulation, no matter how mild, the “all-guns-all-the-time” people freak out as if it was the end of the world. Americans overwhelmingly support more enforcement of background checks, for example. Yet the Congress has decided that universal background checks would make us “worse than China”.

          Hardly. In China, they regulate the number of kids you can have. And believe it or not, your gun collection is not the moral equivalent of having a child.

          But more to the point, gun regulation is not what makes the Chinese government repressive. (They were already repressive, guns are just a small bit of it).

          In the United States, more than 90% of their population wants tougher gun regulation. In China, just as in the United States, their government could not care less what the people want.

          • ““An armed population is a polite population.” No it isn’t. An armed population is a random and dangerous population.”

            Please cite your source for this alleged factoid, because long experience has already shown that it is.

            Are you the kind of person who picks fights with armed people and assumes everyone else is equally stupid?

            • Rich,

              Pick up any newspaper. I picked up my local paper, and scanned for incidents within a ten minute drive for where I work. This is what I came up with:
              http://www.wesh.com/news/central-florida/orange-county/two-hit-in-accidental-shooting-in-orlando-police-say/24744866#mid=18511854

              But you can pick up any newspaper from any big city on most any day of the week and find the same thing. If it is not an accidental shooting, then it will be a shooting in a movie theater over texting, or a shooting in a parking lot over whether music is too loud. If you consider any of these stories to be “polite”, then you and I are using different words to describe random violence.

              Now it is your turn to cite your source. You keep saying that no one picks a fight with anyone who might be armed. Prove it. Give me statistics, not just your opinion of how you think people behave. (Difficulty level: Don’t quote the NRA.)

              And while you are at it, demonstrate to me how being armed de-escalates a situation. Because it has been my experience that cowards arm themselves specifically so that they can escalate a disagreement. You may be a responsible gun owner, but not all gun owners are responsible. That’s the issue.

              That is why, in my opinion, people who are armed are actually more likely to be belligerent jerks than people who are unarmed. They are more likely to use deadly force to solve minor conflicts and they are more likely to accidentally kill people who are just passing by.

              But the increase in guns in America has hardly led to an outbreak of civility or safety. In fact, all it has done is redefine “incivility”.

              • “Now it is your turn to cite your source. You keep saying that no one picks a fight with anyone who might be armed. Prove it. ”

                I can’t. I’m guilty of my own charge. I know I would never pick a fight with an armed person, but I don’t pick fights in any case, and I was at least in error and at worst disingenuous in thinking that other people would behave in a way I believe that they would.

                Sorry. Forgive me?

              • Rich,

                Sorry if my response made it sound personal. I enjoy a good debate from time to time, and it is not fair for me to assume that everyone on the board is a low-information commentator.

                In fact, I have met many people here who are both well-informed and polite. Our opinions may differ, but it is a comments section on a pro-gun website, after all.

                Like you, I lean toward libertarian more than toward either party, but I think that government regulation has its place. Banks, for example, have shown that they think of their customers similar to the way bears think about salmon.

                Guns are a much more delicate issue. Our Constitution puts them in a special class. There are limits to how much guns can be regulated without violating the trust of Americans and the intent of the founding fathers.

                But what can we do? What is the fine line between protecting the public and protecting their rights? I don’t know. But I am guessing that it might involve asking the public what they want.

                And if the public is OK with more background checks, then so am I.

              • ” But I am guessing that it might involve asking the public what they want.”

                Oh, absolutely! The Free market does that on a customer-by-customer basis, you know.

                “And if the public is OK with more background checks, then so am I.”

                I’m not, because The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed.

              • You just set yourself up, in a personal sense, as “the public”, something which is not in evidence.

                There is NO way you are allowed to make such an assumption; stop trying to assume you can speak for society at large. If you had said, “this is what I think”, you would have been within bounds.

                Instead, you believed you had the right to speak for the rest of us. You have no such right, and you possess no such right.

                Furthermore, statistics from numerous public surveys support that you are 180 degrees from actual pubilic opinion in this regard.

                Come back when you have something real to report.

              • My reply elicited a 550. You are asserting public opinion polls which are not in evidence.

                Please try again.

        • So, 90% of Americans want tougher gun laws? With barry and slow joe in charge and 90% support we can’t even get simple national gun laws like UBCs passed?

          Are you honestly going to stand behind that statement. You and piers morgan must be soul mates, Dave.

        • 90%, Dave? Is this one of your “facts” that was “missed”? That lie may not be as old as the repeated arguments you complain about but it is already more tired on top of being completely false.

          You act like you are interested in addressing each point yet conveniently ignore when it is pointed out that you incorrectly labeled knife-wielders as unarmed. You also made it sound like the writer was being dishonest with regards to how many armed knife-wielders there were. You are shown how you are wrong so you ignored that as well.

          Your comments are loaded with Straw Man but the part about you also wanting wings is just too amazing. Is your wingless condition due to oppressive laws or is it for any another reason you can think of?

          There is no obligation to answer a reply to any comment. However, if you do and choose to ignore points where you were called out you have little chance for credibility regardless of the subject.

          • Texas J;

            The 90% fact is from pretty much every poll that has ever been done on the subject. I am not your Google, look it up:
            http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/apr/18/gabrielle-giffords/gabby-giffords-says-americans-overwhelmingly-suppo/

            As far as people having a knife being “armed”, what difference does that make? They were armed with knives instead of guns, and as a result, they had to use more people, more planning, and more brute force to carry out their terrorism.

            Do you see my point? Because if not, I think you are trying to miss it intentionally.

            • Dave, many thanks for your comment, “I am not your Google”. I am sick and weary of people denying what I say, and refusing to look up whether I’m right or wrong.

              Don’t spout off: “THAT’S BS!!), without doing the effing research yourselves. Come back with counter-information, if you can.

              Otherwise, you’re just being an ignorant dipshit.

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