> On 12/17/2012 8:23 PM, Andy wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> Of course it's harder. But it happens:
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers:_Oceania
>
Of course it happens. For all I know somebody's been garrotted with floss. But Jordan made it sound like there was nary a difference in the headlines from gun sprees, as opposed a list topped with some event poorly documented in 1905 and spread over 150 years and multiple populous countries.
I'm puzzled why this is supposed to be salient while Woj's point is cherry picking. As far as I've seen, the landscape resembles health insurance systems in that the US is an outlier in violence overall and gun violence in particular, gun availability, and legal gun restrictions. We can argue whether it's possible to obtain such restrictions and meaningfully enforce them just as we might with getting single payer, or whether we willingly accept the toll. But there is a geographic correlation between the relatively unregulated presence of devices well-designed to kill people and people getting killed with said devices. It would cry out for explanation otherwise. I get that that might be unsatisfyingly mechanistic, but I'm certainly not suggesting that there lacks a wealth of weird-ass social angles.