February 05, 2013
By James Tarr
On Thursday, Jan. 31, in Vancouver, British Columbia, a "seemingly deranged" man ran through the hallways of an apartment building slicing and stabbing people.
The 33-year-old suspect stabbed a total of seven residents before being apprehended by Vancouver police. He's not a resident of the apartment complex, and the victims had no connection to one another other than being residents of the complex, so it appears the attack was a completely random event.
While homicidal maniacs, to use the comic-book-sounding term, tend to use guns in America, around the world they quite often use knives. Crazy is as crazy does, and only the methods differ. A man in China, within a day of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Conn., went on a rampage with a knife and stabbed 22 children. I've seen video of one such attack from the Philippines, where the perpetrator used a machete, and it was ugly; most people couldn't do that much damage with a gun.
Why was a knife used in this attack? There's no way to say for sure. There is more gun control in Canada than in the U.S., but Canadian subjects are allowed to own handguns and semi-auto centerfire rifles such as ARs — they are restricted to 10-round magazines. There is no concealed carry in Canada, however, and all guns must be stored unloaded and separate from ammunition, so armed response to a home invader or attacker will take minutes rather than seconds.
The most interesting this about this event to me was the immediate response across Twitter and the internet. A lot of people sarcastically called for "knife control," a national knife registry, etc., but the scariest (and saddest) thing to me was the deluded fools who concluded that, because nobody died, gun control worked. As the kids like to say, OMG. There are so many things wrong with that conclusion, my head threatens to explode from the trauma to the logic center of my brain.
I'm not in favor of any sort of weapons regulation, or any kind of increased government regulation. But if I was, I would immediately require public school students to take a stringent battery of logic classes, because apparently the critical thinking skills of so many people are near non-existent.
What are your thoughts?
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