welcome! jeremy freese is a professor in sociology at northwestern university. he finds blogging to be a good diversion from insomnia and a far better use of time than television.
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
guns don't kill people, people kill people. knives, by contrast, often don't kill people even when people want them to.
How many times, after a shooting spree, have you heard/read someone in the news saying how the spree speaks to the need for tighter gun control and then heard/read that followed by a counter-quote from someone along the lines of "If it hadn't been a gun, it just would have been something else. Like a knife." While Joe Highschooler can presumably do a lot of damage to one person with a knife--and O. J. Highschooler can presumably do a lot of damage to two--"slashing spree" has just never provoked within me the same chilling potential for deadly carnage as "shooting spree." Now, today, we have the headline on CNN that "Student Slashes 8 at Indiana School." A tragedy, to be sure, and the details as of this writing are still sketchy. However, three paragraphs in: "the injuries weren't life-threatening."
That could well be true, in this case. But what if we lived in a world where he wanted to use a gun and kill schoolmates, but had considerable trouble getting his hands on a gun and so ended up using a knife instead. I know, it sounds like I'm talking crazy like John Lennon's "Imagine" here, but imagine it.
ReplyDeleteThe 'bad guys' in Rwanda certainly didn't have a problem using machetes to butcher thousands of people with, that's for sure. I don't have a statistic on the number of knife homicides there are in the U.S. but I would bet it is more than just a handful. I would suggest also that the trauma of surviving a knife attack is equal to that of being shot and surviving. (goesh -somehow it came out as anonymous)
ReplyDeleteI propose an experiment. During deer-hunting season next year, every other county in, say, Wisconsin, will only allow hunting with knives. The other counties will allow semi-automatic rifles, as usual. Then, at the end of the season, we tally the casualties (and wounds) resulting from accidents, turf-disputes, and the like. I predict less carnage (though likely at the cost of fewer trophy bucks) in the knife-only counties.
ReplyDeleteThe knife hunters would have lots of broken bones attempting to leap out of trees onto the deer; cardiac arrest after trying to run them down and slay them with a knife.
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