> Sean Andrews writes:
>
> It is worth noting - as I did to colleagues who decided the
>> China reference was some sort of counterfactual to the gun
>> problem - that the guy in China was far less efficient: he
>> didn't end up killing anyone. Lanza on the other hand...
>>
>
> Maybe I picked the wrong headline; there are so many. There's plenty of
> mass killing with knives. And certainly you can kill an unarmed person
> with a gun and knife equally if you have the benefit of surprise and a
> little bit of training.
>
I can't say I notice many single-person mass killings with knives. Where do you see this? Yes, you can kill somebody with a knife, but you seem to acknowledge that it's harder to do.
>
> Talking about "efficiency" in this case would also seem to leave open this:
>
>
> "The intense violence lasted about 10 minutes. Lanza fired at
>> least three, 30-round magazines with deadly accuracy.
>>
>
> Except "at least (90 rounds)... with deadly accuracy" does not = 26 dead.
> That sounds rather poor to me, in terms of "killing efficiency" -- what
> seems clear is that "killing efficiency" wasn't on his TODO list that day,
> because if it was, he would have made "at least" 30x3 = "at least" 80+ dead.
>
Isn't the problem with guns and enough ammo is precisely that there's less need for efficiency, training, or surprise to inflict carnage?
>
> Anyway, the point is that if the conclusion is "get rid of the guns, then
> this won't happen!" then you'd better put knives on the list too. Or
> propane tanks. I mean, the grand-daddy of school killngs was the Bath
> School attack, where the guy used basically a car bomb after a year of
> planning.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Bath_School_disaster<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster>
>
>
More precisely, he spent that year weaving a ton of explosives into the
building, which was greatly enabled by his acting as the school maintenance
guy. A black unicorn, then?
I don't think your being fair with the expectation of 100% elimination of murder, wholesale or retail. The only people I've seen frame in this way want to throw sand in your face. Like, you can garrote somebody with floss, so what's the point.
> It would seem worth considering this as a continuum, where having
> fewer assault rifles in the hands of people who would use them on
> other people might be a way to limit the carnage.
>
I'm bumfuzzled by that one. I don't think it's worth considering what kind
> of firepower would be necessary to stop an attack like this. My position
> is that basically if someone is determined enough, no amount of arming
> teachers, locking down schools, etc. is going to stop this kind of thing
> from happening. It happens. It's incredibly rare. But it happens. It
> also happens that large areas of urban US are effectively controlled by
> gangs who are engaged in black market economies that require turf control
> through the pervasive use of violence, but we're not wasting dozens of
> lbo-talk posts talking about that tragedy.
>
>
But, again, this sidesteps the point about a continuum. Nobody expects
this to never happen again, legal guns or no. I'd hazard that the mention
of assault rifles confuses the point, with the semantic problems the term
introduces. And while spree killings may be a statistical outlier in
murder stats, I'm sure the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was a blip on the
harm caused by working conditions of the time. Sometimes a punch in the
face provides a moment of clarity. (Sounds like a lost episode of Berlin
Alexanderplatz.)
-- Andy