10-28-2015, 02:28 PM
(10-20-2015, 02:12 PM)sally Wrote: You did miss the point. You can't kill masses of people at once with knives and baseball bats, you can only do that with guns.
You're mistaken.
I'm hoping the point you were trying to make is that a firearm is more efficient than other hand-held implements, to obtain mass casualties.
If not, here a few examples of mass casualties with "bladed" implements.
All of these occurred in China during a three year period. Unfortunately, many of the details were censored by the Chinese government . . . some speculate to prevent copy-cat incidents.
2010
—A forty-one-year-old man stabbed an unknown number of students in an elementary school. Eight were reported to be killed.
—A thirty-three-year-old man stabbed sixteen students and a teacher in an elementary school. Death toll unknown.
—A forty-seven-year-old man stabbed twenty-eight students, two teachers, and one security guard in a kindergarten. Most of the students were four years old. Death toll unknown.
—A man (age unknown) armed with a hammer attacked children in a preschool. He then committed suicide by dousing himself in gasoline and setting himself on fire. The number of injured and killed is unknown.
—A forty-eight-year-old man, armed with a cleaver, attacked a kindergarten class, where he murdered seven children and two adults and injured eleven others.
—A twenty-six-year-old man slashed more than twenty children and staff at a kindergarten, killing three children and one teacher.
2011
—An employee at a child-care center (age unknown), armed with a box-cutter, slashed eight children, all aged four or five. Death toll unknown.
—A thirty-year-old man, armed with an axe, murdered a one-year-old and a four-year-old and four adults who where taking their children to a nursery school.
2012
—A thirty-six-year-old man hacked and stabbed an elderly woman and twenty-three children at an elementary school. It was reported that, due to immediate trauma care in three different hospitals, none of the victims died, although some were seriously injured, with fingers and ears cut off.
—A seventeen-year-old man stabbed to death nine people and wounded four others with a knife in China’s Liaoning Province following an argument with his girlfriend.
And here's one from Japan:
In 2008, a thirty-seven-year-old man entered an elementary school in Osaka , Japan, armed with a kitchen knife. He murdered eight children and seriously wounded thirteen other kids, along with two teachers.
And to illustrate the "gun-free" Utopian land of Oz . . .
A study, done by Wang-Sheng Lee and Sandy Suardi of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, at the University of Melbourne, concluded that the “results of these tests suggest that the NFA [the 1996– 97 National Firearms Agreement] did not have any large effects on reducing firearm homicide or suicide rates.”
A second study, done by Jeanine Baker of the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia and Samara McPhedran of the University of Sydney, and published in the British Journal of Criminology, reached a similar conclusion: “Homicide patterns (firearm and non-firearm) were not influenced by the NFA, the conclusion being that the gun buy -back and restrictive legislative changes had no influence on firearm homicide in Australia.”
One final note on the agreement’s impact on Australian crime.
Armed robberies exploded after the new laws, from about 6,000 in 1996 to around 10,000 between 1998 and 2001 , before declining to pre-buyback levels in 2004. BTW - More government funding was made available for additional police forces, in 2003.
In other words, fewer guns resulted in more armed robberies and roughly the same number of murders— not exactly a shining example of the Utopian society that awaits all of us if only we’d agree to ban semi-automatics and high capacity mags.