By Clay Aalders via The Truth About Knives
“Absolutely, a murderer can often kill one person or two with a knife before being stopped. But to really rack up those mind-blowing death counts – to make sure that many lives are destroyed and families ruined in the space of five or 10 minutes – you need a gun. If all you care about is apportioning blame and declaring that someone does or does not have murderous intent, then by all means, claim a knife and a gun are equivalent weapons.” Apparently Rolling Stone writer Amanda Marcotte hasn’t read about the Bath School Massacre, the most deadly school massacre in U.S. history which was carried out with explosives . . .
Or she hasn’t spent much time following the assorted knife massacres in China, like the one at the Kunming Railway Stationthat killed 33 people. Or this one at a Chinese colliery that left 50 dead just last week. Granted, those are coordinated actions by groups of Uighur seperatists (jihadis). But one man with a knife can kill several people like this market vendor who killed 5 in a business dispute.
Mass killings with knives are not unique to China. 500 people in Nigeria were killed by groups of rioters with machetes. That is obviously the most extreme example, and was carried out by many attackers, but there have been machete attacks all over the continent.
Israel is experiencing what is being called the “knife intifada”. There have been dozens of attacks, among them one at a Jerusalem synagogue which left 4 dead and 12 wounded. Israeli spree-stabbings are not limited to jihadis, a Jewish fundamentalist attacked a Gay Pride march killing 1 and wounding 4.
In 2001 in Japan, a man attacked an elementary school with a kitchen knife, killing 8 and wounding 15. In 2008, a Japanese man killed 3 and injured 2 more with his truck, before killing 4 and wounding 12 more with a knife.
A woman in Australia killed her 8 children,by stabbing them to death last December.
Knife crime in the UK is not typically of the spree variety, rather is more akin to the vast majority of gun homicides in major U.S. cities – gang related and of the 1-2 victim variety. But the aggregate figures are staggering. There are more than 1000 stabbings and knife robberies each month in London alone.
In the US, the most notable mass stabbing was at the Franklin Regional High School where 24 people were injured. Thankfully, the attacker was only 16 and mostly slashed rather than stabbed his victims, so none of them died. However in a case from Oklahoma this July, 5 members of a family were stabbed to death by two of the family’s sons. Another father in New York stabbed his 3 children to death before attempting to take his own life.
According to the FBI, in 2011 there were 1694 knife homicides, or roughly 20% the total of those killed with guns. This is followed incidentally by hands/feet/body strikes (728) and blunt objects (496). By my math, this add up to 2918 knife/club/unarmed striking deaths, or about 25% of total U.S. homicides.
My point in all of this is not to claim that a knife is the most efficient tool to kill multiple people. It isn’t. However, any object can be used as a weapon. With enough planning, training, or simply brute strength, melee weapons are perfectly capable of inflicting unspeakable harm and have in countless cases been the weapon of choice for a heart intent on mass murder. No amount of weapon prohibition will stop people from killing others.
This point is lost on those at Rolling Stone. Or it could be that Ms. Marcotte is being purposefully obtuse. Rolling Stone has shown that they are perfectly willing to misrepresent facts when it can advance their political agenda.
Rolling stone is still in business? Is that rag still relevant? I thought the only people buying that thing were aging hippies who were covered in mud at Woodstock.
They rolled right out of the circle of relevance a long while ago
Fresh off their self-credibility-shredding experience advancing a false campus rape narrative in Virginia, you’d think Rolling Stone would settle back for a while and rebuild; perhaps reporting nothing more controversial than that apple pie is delicious and motherhood is virtuous.
Even though the entire mag is a joke, I believe they stopped doing satire when P.J. O’Rourke left.
Has she ever see. Friday the 13th? Or the following? If I wanted to kill a lot
Of people and didn’t care who they where I would make a bomb not try a gun. With a bomb you don’t have to even be there.
But even if she was right so what. Mass killings are a statisticly tiny portion of murders in the Usa. With less than a couple hundred people killed each year even by the lefts numbers. While guns save 1000s each year from death rape and injury.
They moved from music to politics in order to stay above water.
Nigeria is not the most extreme example of modern “knife” violence/death, Rwanda is, by far.
Beat me to it. About 1mm mainly with machetes and garden implements.
And many more left alive without a limb or two, or ears, scalped, etc.
Gasoline , Acetone , gun powder , pressure cooker and nails , Bleach and Ammonia , and lets not forget those big bad SUVs . Hey , I know , What about lets mix one high school football game with Gasoline , Acetone , gunpowder , some pressure cookers , screws and nails , some electrical wire and a big bad SUV . I wonder who would win that blood fest ?
I used to be that nobody paid attention to radical retards , now they create policy in DC .
Look out common sense , here they come .
Old tires pushed down over the shoulders of a victim , splashed with diesel and lit on fire is a South African ‘necklace’…
Well that’s not environmentally friendly at all. 🙂
Rolling Stone? Really? Who next, Mad Magazine? Exactly WHO gives a fat flying f—k what anyone from RS thinks or writes?
Liberal-leaning independents who vote care about that rag. It suckers them in by pretending to be a music publication, but its main intent is to push political ideas.
Son, I’m not sure where you found her, but you need to take her back there and drop her off before your mom gets home.
Now I have to clean my screen. I just spewed coffee on it.
dh34… Subtle, brutal, funny….perfect.
This “lady” looks like she spends a little too much effort trying to look cool, when she is obviously not spending enough time researching her stories. Just another liberal moron efforting to be relevant and failing miserably, proof of that…she writes for Rolling Stone.
Machetes are bad enough, but I believe any decent sword could also be classified as a knife. Any person with even a little skill could wade into a crowd with a katana or some other battle-proven sword design and do some serious damage. Thank goodness no one seems to have worked this out recently.
The “Messer” was a German sword designed specifically to get around German law at the time banning “swords” for the average person. Due to the technicalities of the law, the messer is a knife (which is the literal translation, I think) bit it’s a danged sword by any practical measure.
ME109 is more effective than a Messer.
Yes, but these Fokkers were flying Messersmihts.
@ Cliff H
Unfortunately, the 2008 Akihabara massacre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre) proves your point. Then there are the Chinese mass knife attacks with fatality and injury rates that are up there with mass killings involving guns. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_%282010%E2%80%9312%29)
But alas, neither the political hack passing as as a journalist nor the editor of her political rag could be bothered to do any kind of fact-checking.
Rolling Stone’s influence on public views of firearm policy shall be determined by the quality of their writing…………for some reason, in this instance I am not choking on my coffee.
That being the case, I believe my dog just wrote an article for Rolling Stone in the yard. Copy boy….Pick up!
You are definitely on a roll this morning.
Looking forward to more dgu stories.
These are just mind boggling dumb, i lost an iq point reading it.
Let’s not forget that while jetliners were used on 9-11, they were taken control of by men with mere box cutters. No guns, or blade weapons, were involved in the 1995 OKC bombing, either.
In fact, plenty of murderous bombings and arson have killed more people per incident than this week’s Oregon shooting.
It’s worse than asinine to blame the guns and restrict the guns, thinking that will stop madmen and instead not just leave innocents even more vulnerable to them. It’s unconscionable.
And don’t forget about what someone could do with a pickup truck — get up to 70 mph and then plow into the crowds streaming out of a large sports stadium. That will wrack up a large body count much faster than a firearm.
She also claims that guns never stop a mass killer. Except for the new life church attack in Colorado Springs and every time the cops show up (10 minutes to late) and shoot the bad guy. She looks angry and bitter.
Don’t forget the mall shooter in Oregon stopped by a concealed carrier, the theater shooter stopped by an off duty cop in San Antonio, and the school shooting in Colorado stopped by a school resource officer. And many others I can’t think of offhand right now.
MArcotte dismisses the Oregon concealed carrier because he “only” stopped the carnage after someone was shot.
Marcotte is a well known liberal blogger who, at one time, did the online thing for John Edwards’ campaign, back before the world discovered that Edwards (and his perfectly coiffed hair) was getting his campaign photographer pregnant.
If you’ve tracked her at all, you’d know that this isn’t her first brush with irrationality. No, no, my friend. She is quite comfortable with her irrationality. Proud of it, in fact.
How many times must we listen to this nonsense. The only action that stops a murderer, robber, or rapist is to use a gun…period. Responsible mass conceal carry ends gun violence.
Okay then, just how ‘efficient’ should our means of defense be before they are to be limited (seeing how England is trying to ban knives, now)?
I ain’t taken any guff from a magazine that starts screaming COLLEGE RAPE without even trying to verify a thing about the claims.
Mass murder-suicides are committed by crazy depressed and and angry people who perceive their condition to be because the world has slighted them. They do it as a display of their anger, depression, and craziness, to assert their “power” via “I’m the baddest boogeyman you’ve ever seen yet!” so people notice them, remember them, and fear them.
To guarantee they are noticed and feared they don’t have to try too hard. They simply adopt whatever the cultural persona of the “boogeyman” is (this persona often refined, advertised and glorified by the media!). In the USA this is “the spree shooter”. In the middle east this boogeyman is “the suicide bomber”. In Southeast Asia the boogeyman is “the arsonist”. In other places the boogeyman just presses on the gas a little and rams their vehicles through crosswalks full of pedestrians.
The fact that people with guns, flammable liquids, explosive materials, and commuter vehicles SO RARELY commit mass murder is because MOST PEOPLE ARE REASONABLE AND GOOD. All of these “weapons” have numerous legitimate uses and exist in great numbers without issue in most cases. If you try to legislate this problem away by restricting these common and useful items then the cultural boogeyman will simply be re-engineered based on whatever the recent mass murder is, and then instead of shootings there will be arson, bombings, or vehicle rammings, society will glorify these methods, and then the occasional crazy depressed angry person will emulate the new boogeyman’s methods.
Bombers seem to be the most prevalent but Arsonists are particularly scary:
Xiamen bus fire 2013
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiamen_bus_fire
47 murdered
Chengdu bus fire 2009
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengdu_bus_fire
27 murdered
Daegu subway fire 2003
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daegu_subway_fire
192 murdered
Happy Land Social Club:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Land_fire
“Daegu subway fire 2003
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daegu_subway_fire
192 murdered”
That is just godawful. Thankfully our crazies haven’t turned to flammable liquids or murder rates would skyrocket.
Rolling Stones is a propaganda publication of the Democrat Party that tries to pass themselves as an objective news source. They are responsible for some of the most despicable writings since the inception of free speech. I find it difficult to understand how a free society can pay money to be lied to.
1,000 stabbings a month in London? That gun free paradise is many times more violent than Chicago even. There’s nowhere near that amount of deadly force attacks in Chicago.
The London data is for stabbings and knife robberies. There wasn’t a further breakdown that I could find at the time.
London (Camden specifically) is the only place I’ve ever been to where I walked around bar fights spilling out onto the sidewalk from pub entrances like something out of a movie. Last time I was there in 2011 there were gangs of North African teens everywhere, spotted some walking around with tiny baseball bats. A lot of the London area is a shit hole and you better be a big guy who walks with a purpose if you go out at night.
Is her defiant pinky in the air the new adolescent, insider, hipster way of flipping the bird, without getting edited?
According to Rolling Stone, every woman in college has been raped at least six times (this semester!), every man in college is a rapist, maniacs have all the guns and progesterone is a vitamin.
And here I thought that if you wanted to kill a lot of people quickly, you only needed an easily found army publication and a short trip to Rurak King.
And that was supposed to be Rural King.
Imagination isn’t the strong suit of these people. It’s in short supply everywhere, but notably in gun-wailers.
Series request. We keep hering a gun Never stopped a mass shooting. Can we start a running list of incidents that would likly have been mass shootings.
I know we cannot prove a mass shooting would have happened. However cases like the Dr in Pa who shot a patient attacking people in the ER are highly likly to have been mass shootings.
Duh! If a gun stopped a mass shooting, it does not count as a mass shooting, therefore a gun never stopped a mass shooting!
Do I get prohibitionist logic about right? 🙂
The most effective ways of killing people are explosives and fire.
And yet we don’t see that with rare outliers. So while it may be a theoretical truth, in practice guns are easier.
I don’t carry a grenade in my pocket, I carry a gun, for just that reason.
Guns are the method of first resort in the US because we are gun toting people Take away the guns and the mind of the fame seeking mass murderer goes to work. It took a day for EOD techs to allow safe entry into Holmes’ s apartment. Denied the use of guns I am sure Holmes would have chosen incediraries or explosives to do the deed with a much higher casualty count.
Anybody with a working knowledge of organic chemistry can go down to the local Home Depot and whip up a batch of explosives, incediraries or chemical weapons.
When discussing mass shootings, guns are the method of choice over explosives or anything else because it fits their obsession. Back when Virginia Tech happened someone on a different forum or possibly usenet posted a link to a forum that was dedicated to mass shootings and on this website they were discussing how many “points” the killer “acquired” as he apparently used a knife which does not count towards your “score” (according to the rules and guidelines setup by the site).
Back then I was not as much of a 2A activist as I am now, when I saw the site I was more sickened than anything else (and shocked and the high number of members) but now I have to wonder if the operator of that site doesn’t have some sort of anti-gun agenda pushing sheepish adolescents to do horrible things.
I tried to find the site (and put myself probably on some sort of list while doing so) but was not successful. It may have been shut down, moved, or is just well hidden from google but that kind of garbage spreads like wildfire with these techy kids.
She’s right, even if gun folks don’t want to agree with her. There’s a reason mass murderers usually use guns.
But it’s the same reason cops carry guns. The same reason the elderly who are in no shape to fight off an attacker may carry guns. The same reason there is a 2nd Amendment. Guns work better as an ‘equalizer’ for good and ill.
I bet that this Rolling Stone Rag has a no guns allowed policy . Just in case there are any nuts out there ready to stand up and be noticed . I bet they would welcome a basement boy into their abode .
You might say she’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer…
I’ve heard that extreme domestic violence in Asian nations (with strict gun laws) often involves (very common) cleavers. And that women are most prone to use them.
And writing the above left me with a notable ache below the belt…
We’re talking about Rolling Stone here. Who cares what these mutants say? You know it’s going to be absolute hypocritical Liberal drivel.
So I am safe in Wales?
I wasn’t.
Not wasting my time on Amanda Marcotte. Her 15 minutes was over long ago.
If the loonies at Rolling Stones were dogs, you could provide a merciful euthansia,
but since we cant, better to just ignore them, dont let them into your house to pee on the rug, or bite your ankles.
Not to glorify a spree killer, but the Isla Vista killer started his rampage by stabbing his three roommates to death. Fully half the people he killed were with a knife, and seven of the fourteen injured survivors were those hit by his car, yet it was characterized as a “shooting” spree by the media.
Worse mass killing in u.s. history was 911, carried out with box cutters. Then there was the okc bombing with diesel and fertalizer, and that time a man used 75 cents worth of gasoline to burn down a night club and kill several scores of people. And yet there is no background check or paperwork to buy, gasoline, diesel, fertalizer, or box cutters…..
Can you kill lots of people, yes, it is possible. But why are few are often killed when great potential exists? Because these people are off their friggin’ rocker! If the goal is to kill in great numbers bombs are what is used, not a gun. Besides, the chances of dying in your car is far greater, so why all the hatred? Who exactly is off their rocker?
I guess I’m a little late to the party but I’ll throw this out there on the off chance someone sees this. Anyway, the main reason that mass shootings typically outstrip stabbing sprees in number of dead is simply because of the greater imbalance of force between the armed attacker and the unarmed victims. Think about it, the lethality of an individual armed with a knife is only marginally greater than that of an unarmed victim and such, given favorable circumstances and the will to fight, the knife wielding attacker’s victims stand a fair chance of ending the spree themselves. On the other hand, in a mass shooting scenario, the lethal potential of a gun wielding attacker is so much greater than that of their unarmed victims that even with the warrior mentality the chances of an unarmed victim being able to end the fight are nil; the shooting in Oregon being a prime example of this.
If a gun wielding attacker were instead faced with gun wielding victims, the difference in lethality would be much less (potentially none). Were this the case, I expect that the number of deaths from mass shootings would be very near the number of deaths from current stabbing sprees and possibly even less as the gun makes differences in physical build irrelevant.
I live in Utah, where guns have been allowed on campus for years and yet no blood flows down our streets. No one has pulled out a concealed handgun and open fire on their teacher in a fit of rage because mass shooters aren’t angry, they are mentally ill.
And finally, since guns make differences in physical build irrelevant, a gunfight could be considered to be a contest of training and will. Seeing as mass shooters, being seriously mentally ill, probably have difficulty
‘keeping it together’ and are usually poorly trained with firearms, if at all, it only increases their would be victims chances if it comes down to, essentially, a contest of will and training.
I know an English woman who was assaulted by a dirtbag using a bat, it only took her 2 weeks to gt out of the hospital. No double standards put DC politicians on Obamacare and SS.Thanks for your support and vote. Pass the word. mrpresident2016.com
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