Earlier today, a Lone Star College student brought a knife, not a gun, onto the college’s CyFair campus and stabbed, but didn’t shoot, at least fourteen people.
Local authorities have taken a 21 year old man into custody; he is currently the only suspected attacker. There are no suspected shooters. Two people are in critical condition, none are dead.
On December 14th, 2012, Adam Lanza took an arsenal into Sandy Hook elementary school and shot, not stabbed, twenty-six people, including twenty children. Twenty children and six adults died that day.
On the same day as the Sandy Hook massacre, Min Yingjun took a knife, not a gun, into a primary school in central China and stabbed, not shot, twenty two children of similar ages. While all twenty-six of Lanza’s victims died, none of Yingjun’s did.
Gun and knife via Shutterstock
As was the case in the wake of Newtown, my Facebook feed is currently blowing up with posts about how you can’t keep people from breaking the law, and that violent people will find a way to be violent, regardless of what weapons we ban or regulate.
And they’re right; there will always be nuts out there who want to hurt others.
But if this is the case, and we can’t do anything about violence in and of itself, certainly we should do what we can to prevent “violence” from becoming “gun violence.” The crime rate may not change, but the body count sure as hell will.
Of course, that didn’t stop gun extremists from claiming that today’s violence proves that we need more guns, not fewer:
Anti-gun laws kill MT @washtimes After Texas stabbing student laments ‘We wish we could protect ourselves with guns’ wtim.es/10GqGWp
— Rep. Steve Stockman (@SteveWorks4You) April 9, 2013
Right. Then we could have had 14 dead people today in Texas. A point that the NYT’s Nicholas Kristof noted as well:
14 people injured in stabbing rampage at Lone Star College in Texas. If that had been a gun, it might have been 14 dead.
— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) April 9, 2013
Knives don’t kill people. Guns kill people.
