As New York legislators were hastily passing the SAFE Act, which “mandates that law enforcement personnel seize [some firearms], without a warrant, probable cause or hearing,” a deranged teenage boy entered a Pennsylvania school on Wednesday and went on a slashing spree that left 21 fellow students and a security guard wounded.
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Fortunately, no one was killed, although there are a handful still battling life-threatening injuries.
Seeing as there will be no “knife control” debates to follow, could the Murrysville stabbing be a snapshot of an America Yet to Come–an America without guns? Given the state of affairs in the United Kingdom, Australia and China, three places with bloated knife violence statistics and tight gun control, it’s not an implausible idea.
But as expected, Second Amendment supporters are being criticized by liberals for saying that stabbings like this incident remind us what life would be like can be like for an absolutely gunless citizenry. A Wonkette headline says it all: “Gun Humpers Pretty Thrilled About Pennsylvania High School Boy Stabbing All Those Kids.”
First, it’s impossible to have a constructive debate when using terms like “Gun Humper.” Second, it’s even more impossible to get anywhere when simplistic arguments like “if we take away guns there will be less shootings” become commonplace. Maxwell Strachan made that exact argument a few months ago at the Huffington Post.
Strachan wrote, “After 35 people were murdered by a single man in Australia in the mid-1990s, the government banned shotguns and assault weapons, enacted stricter licensing rules and launched a number of gun buyback programs. Within roughly a decade, gun-related murders were down nearly 60 percent.”
But as Strachan pointed out the obvious, he ignored the violent crime rate.
Since 1996, assault and murder-by-knife percentages have steadily increased. The absence of guns as a deterrent has reduced Australians’ self-defense options. As recently as 2011, statistics show knife crime remains prevalent, as “almost half of murder victims were killed by a knife and knives also represented 49 percent of the weapons used in armed robberies.”
As for England, The Telegraph ran a headline in 2009, which declared that the “UK is [the] violent crime capital of Europe.”
The Telegraph noted, “Analysis of figures from the European Commission showed a 77 percent increase in murders, robberies, assaults and sexual offences in the UK since Labour came to power.” It turns out that recession in the UK created an unhappy populace, which in turn led to about 1000 knife crimes in London per month.
And, perhaps the biggest indictment of all, the UK crime rate of 2,000 crimes per 100,000 population outranks the U.S. by a wide margin — “America has an estimated rate of 466 violent crimes per 100,000 population.”
Let’s not forget either the horrific knife assault of a train station in China, which left 29 dead and 143 wounded.
Wonkette mocked the comparison of Murrysville to China’s 9/11, which, granted, is somewhat apples to oranges considering the scale of death and carnage. But the principle behind the comparison cannot and should not be mocked.
Statistics across cultures consistently show that there is a clear correlation between the increase in other forms of violent crime at knife-point and the lack of guns among a law abiding citizenry.
All of this goes to show that removing the gun-deterrent from society may lead to less homicides overall, but it will also exacerbate other forms of violent crime and, of course, prevent citizens from having the best tools possible in defending themselves against such violence.