"An emotionally disturbed man wielding scissors stabbed or slashed at least five people, including a father and his toddler, in a park along the Hudson River on Manhattan’s Upper West Side early Tuesday, according to the police."
Meanwhile, last Friday, in another Upper West Side park, "a man approached [a] woman as she was pushing her 8-month-old baby in a stroller. The attacker had a broken bottle and grabbed the woman but she fought back and hit him several times with a bicycle air pump, the police said. The mother and her child escaped unharmed. There has been no arrest in the case."
If you are a gun-control advocate, I know your response to my snark: No one died in either of these incidents. If the emotionally disturbed man had had a gun, the 5 victims might be dead, and if the mother with the stroller had had a gun the broken-bottle man might have died or if broken-bottle man had had a gun then she and the baby might have died.
Isn't this the city of your dreams — a kinder, gentler place where everyone is armed only with household objects, objects with manifold peaceful uses, and not those terrible guns, objects designed only to kill?
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Not to mention scalpels, pipettes, and vacuums. These three instruments, and scissors, have been used to terminate more human lives than guns will ever claim.
Bloomberg will be calling for securing household items. Count on it. Security checkpoints at park entrances probably, at least a token mention.
Always look for gun-control advocates to conveniently omit any mention of mental health issues in their claims. From my experience living in NYC, the place breeds unbalanced people. Fortunately, the mother kept her wits about her.
Are emotionally-challenged people a Democrat constituency? Get out the vote?
Ann,
In the far East people now and then go 'Amonk'. That is their term when someone gets a machete and goes through the market place hacking people to death.
Yes to death. Lots are killed.
Guns are a means. Some use them for good, some bad. And since it is easy to build them and make ammo (CNC machinery and a high school lab will do that) then you can no more ban them than you can ban the methods of making Meth.
BUT, that gun can keep you weaker person from being maimed or killed by the stronger in size or numbers.
Down here in Texas everyone has a gun who so desires to get one (legal or illegal) and many a good folk have them. Thus our crime rates are less than Chicago or NYC or Los Angeles.
For good people have them here to.
Better not let this guy learn any basic chemistry or we'll be talking about government registration and control of basic household cleaning products.
Second Amendment aside, I don't think anyone in their right mind wants to live in a UK-type environment where the right to self-defense has been essentially done away with.
In the UK, you can (I'm being quite serious) be arrested for 1) coming to the aid of someone being attacked, 2)using too much force defending yourself (and non just lethal/non-lethal means, hitting someone "too many times"), and 3) brandishing a kitchen knife in your own house at someone trying to break in.
A written constitution. It's a beautiful thing, but you have to defend it all, not just the parts you like.
Well, you're quite right: a gun will do nothing for you after a lunatic pushes you onto the subway tracks. (For what it's worth, some lines seem to have man-shaped indents in outer walls ever 20 feet or so; perhaps one of these could be used as a refuge of last resort if there isn't time to climb back onto the platform).
And that homeless person defecating onto the sidewalk isn't likely to kill you either- more of a quality of life issue.
But perhaps what would be truly kinder and gentler to everyone would be the ability and willingness of authorities to force lunatics into involuntary treatment?
Since we don't know how many guns have prevented deaths, just by their very appearance during a robbery or attempted attack, it's impossible to prove a point to those determined to outlaw guns. It's much like having a debate about voter ID laws. If one can't check for fraud, one can't prove its existence. Therefore, since we don't know it, it's not true. Sigh.
The Big Lie at the center of the article you linked to is the notion that guns are unregulated. Could you and Meade run out and buy a fully automatic firearm, Professor? Could I? Could Markos Moulitsas? Nope, nope, and nope. Same is true for a shotgun whose barrel has been cut down to 17 and 15/16 inches or shorter. Not legally, anyway. The only group of citizens who can buy either are inner city gang-bangers.
"Isn't this the city of your dreams — a kinder, gentler place where everyone is armed only with household objects, objects with manifold peaceful uses, and not those terrible guns, objects designed only to kill?"
Yes it is, but not for that reason. It's a safer place than it was in the 70s and 80s. Lots of NYers are wondering whether it will stay that way. De Blasio thinks the City is suffering from a crime wave, but unfortunately he thinks that the problem is centered in the NYPD. So many of the newbies here don't remember (or never knew) why, before Giuliani time, NYC was called Calcutta on the Hudson. They may be about to learn.
Human Beings evolved to kill, too.
Richard Dolan: "They may be about to learn."
LOL
Richard Dolan's comment presumes liberals are capable of learning.
If they were, they would not be liberals.
And that includes the "credentialed but not truly educated" ones.
Billy Johnson is commenting for the NRA now, and he had a great video that touched on this topic tangentially.
I first encountered his videos when he described himself as a proud member of both the NRA and the ACLU.
It inspired me to look into joining the ACLU, actually. After I checked out their website I decided I wasn't going to, but he did make me look.
Their staunch opposition to Voter ID is what ultimately turned me away, if you're at all curious.
I ran the calculations once and less than 0.1% of all bullets shot per year are fired at something with the intent to kill it. The rest either put a hole in a piece of paper or break a clay disc. Millions of people use guns recreationally and never, ever kill anything. Pushing the "guns' sole purpose is to kill" meme is straight out of 1984. But they'll keep pushing it, because telling the truth won't get them their desired aim.
It seems to me the difference between the anti-civil rights crowd and the pro-civil rights crowd is that the latter tell you right up front what their objectives are, but the former group misleads and lies about theirs.
"Designed to kill"?
You say that like killing is bad.
(It's also false, in that many firearms are "designed" for target shooting.)
I'd rather the mother with child be able to shoot the nut with a broken bottle, myself, in a pinch.
Isn't this the city of your dreams — a kinder, gentler place where everyone is armed only with household objects, objects with manifold peaceful uses, and not those terrible guns, objects designed only to kill?
No, but then I'm not a misogynist, ageist or ableist, nor do I go around wishing being a relatively fit young male provided me with more of a power advantage over others. What kind of malignant rapist would you have to be to want that world?
It's like nuclear weapons- they are used all the time. Nations have to act differently because of nukes, so that's a use.
For instance, the United States used nuclear weapons during the Cold War to avoid having to raise an army of several million men to defend the Free World. As a result, the US didn't go broke paying for tanks and guns but the USSR did. In a very real sense, the US won the Cold War by using nuclear weapons.
The same dynamic exists with firearms- they're used much more often than they are fired. If a potential robber is scared off by their victim having a gun there's no crime statistic. We only hear about when a gun is fired, not every time one is used.
So, the gun control argument is missing a lot of data. We're not looking at all the uses of firearms, only the subset where they are fired at people.
The argument is moot: small arms have flooded America by the tens of millions & they're not going anywhere. That there's no political constituency willing &/or able to go toe-to-toe with the NRA/ALEC lobbyists is patently obvious by now, making all the "Obama's gonna take our guns" drama look less like lucid cynicism than a pathetic cry for help. No amount of hero-fantasy or crime-prevention rationalizing changes the simple fact that keeping a gun in the home is the best guarantee of winding up shot.
To repeat: the best any American can hope for at this point is not to be the next victim.
I suppose having a car is the best way to get in an auto accident.
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