Newtown shooting and gun control

[AllThingsKC]

Don't shoot the messenger. Or in this case, don't stab the messenger.

[chaglang]

At least 29 dead, 113 injured in China knife attack

Ban Knives.

Looks like we have an early favorite for Dumb Argument of the Day.

[phuqueue]

You might say that trying to make such a weak argument is a bit like bringing a knife to a gunfight.

You might.

[AllThingsKC]

Banning almost anything is a pretty weak argument.

[phuqueue]

"Ban guns" isn't an argument, it's a position for which you advance arguments. "Ban knives" in this context implies an argument that banning guns would have no effect because people would find other ways to kill each other anyway, which is asinine.

[mean]

I thought it was implying an argument that banning anything as the direct result of a particular isolated incident is bad policy. It could be interpreted in several ways, though. Whatever. Either way, yeah... not an argument.

[AllThingsKC]

Banning a particular object won't stop those with mental health issues or those who simply desire to do bad things from achieving whatever they're determined to do. If someone is determined to cause harm, they will do so using whatever means they can, even if said object is illegal.

[grovester]

Fucking stupid Chinese, taking 10 people to do what one could have done with a gun. Maybe someday they'll join the 21st century.

[AllThingsKC]

Fucking stupid Chinese, taking 10 people to do what one could have done with a gun. Maybe someday they'll join the 21st century.

No joke! Why would they waste their time with knives when they can kill 159 people with one bomb like Timothy McVeigh did.

If the argument is, "if guns were illegal, people wouldn't use them for harm," then wouldn't that same logic apply to bombs?

[phuqueue]

The argument isn't "if guns were illegal, people wouldn't use them for harm," it's that if guns were illegal, people wouldn't use them at all. As it is, guns can only be used for harm in the first place: more than 30,000 people in America die every year to gun violence (including accidents, etc). I don't know what the numbers are for bombs, but I'm guessing it's quite a bit lower, and the mere fact that you had to pull a twenty year old example to make your point is evidence of that (although obviously there have been more recent bombings). Incidentally, we do have "bomb control," to the extent that obviously ready-made bombs are not something you can just buy in a shop, and law enforcement watches for people buying various bomb ingredients, and it seems to be working. People still occasionally manage to pull off a bombing, but it's a rare event that makes (inter)national headlines.

Gun control doesn't eliminate violence and that is not its goal (that goal, while noble, is a silly fantasy). Rather, it makes it harder to inflict widespread violence. grovester makes exactly this point above: even though this attack actually did produce a death toll on par with a shooting spree, it required a large, organized group to carry it out. How many more people would have died if they were firing into the crowd instead? While mass stabbings can happen (obviously), they are rarer and, on balance, much less deadly than mass shootings, which are typically committed by a lone nut (and in America are often committed with legally-purchased weapons). If you can find twenty people who are all willing to go out and stab somebody with you, you can probably kill twenty other people in a mass stabbing, but if you're all alone with your knives, you're unlikely to rack up the same body count that you would with a gun, for patently obvious reasons (most notably that with a knife you can only attack people within arm's length, but beyond that there's also the fact that, while a knife can obviously be plenty deadly, slashing wildly at people around you is less likely to inflict a fatal wound than spraying bullets into a crowd). The saying about "bringing a knife to a gunfight" refers directly to the clear disadvantages of knives vs. guns, which is why I invoked it above. You cannot make a legitimate argument that knives are as deadly as guns, even if a knife is perfectly capable of killing as well. You'd look foolish to even try.

There's another perfectly obvious reason why knives (and most other weapons, for that matter) are not analogous to guns: utility. Guns essentially have none. The purpose of a gun is to fire a bullet into something and there are precious few ways to use that ability constructively. It's not practical to ban knives, or hammers, or even bombs (specifically the various ingredients that make up bombs, although even explosives like C4 and dynamite have their roles, eg in construction and excavation) because we need these things to accomplish perfectly legitimate, useful, harmless ends. It's unfortunate that they can also be turned against us, but we could not have modern society without these tools, so that's something we have to live with. People keep guns, on the other hand, either to commit crimes with them, to protect themselves from potential crimes, or for sport. The first point is obviously illegitimate. The second is only made necessary because we are already awash in guns (don't think so? Look at every country in the world with strong gun control policies and see what their rates of gun violence are). The third, fine, but a) hunting rifles don't make very good murder weapons and wouldn't necessarily need to be banned in the first place (although certainly some control is in order -- licensing, background checks, etc), and b) if theoretically there were some clear, strong correlation between rifles and gun violence then everyone else's right not to get murdered trumps your right to have fun hunting, going to the firing range, etc.

I guess the biggest problem with this bombs argument though is what it actually implies. Since McVeigh managed to build a bomb and kill people with it, would your position then be that everybody has a right to own as many bombs as they want? And if so, how far down that line are you willing to go? McVeigh built a bomb out of fertilizer and whatever -- should he have had free and easy access to dynamite? Hell, if he can pull together the cash, how about a small nuke? If people are just going to find a way to kill no matter what, why bother controlling any sort of weapon at all? Oh yeah, it's because a guy with a knife can't kill as many people as a guy with a hydrogen bomb. That people occasionally manage to evade a ban is not an argument for lifting the ban when the thing itself should rightfully be banned. Even Japan has a handful of gun murders per year -- and by handful I mean 11 in 2008 (the most recent year that ten seconds on Google yields a number for), but I suspect that you won't find widespread support for relaxing gun control there on that basis, nor on the basis that terrorists released sarin on the Tokyo subway twenty years ago, or whatever other sort of "logic" you'd like to apply.

You're right that "those who simply desire to do bad things" might achieve "whatever they're determined to do," but we don't have to make it so easy. Mass murder does not, in fact, have to be a fait accompli. It only is in America because we've decided to make it so.