I don’t mean to trivialize the injuries suffered in the
knife attack perpetrated by a high school sophomore at a high school in
Murrysville, Pennsylvania. It’s another
in a long and seemingly endless line of incidents of mass violence at American
schools. Of the 20 students and one teacher stabbed by teenaged loony Alex
Hribal, at least four have serious wounds.
But all are expected to survive.
Imagine if instead of two large knives, Hribal had been
packing a bolt-action rifle like his brother-in-arms, Adam Lanza, who killed 20
children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut? Or how
about if Hribal’s weapons of choice were semi-automatic handguns, like
Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 and injured 17 in his rampage on the Virginia Tech
University campus a few years back?
Just imagine if Hribal were toting a semi-automatic. The
injuries would have been much worse than what he perpetrated with two knifes.
There most assuredly would have been several if not many deaths. And the attack
would have lasted much longer, because
the teacher who tackled Hribal would not have been able to do it—he
would have been shot—maybe dead—before he got close enough to touch the maniac.
As tragic as the knife attack was, I’m fairly sure that the
parents of at least some of the victims are muttering quietly to themselves how
relieved they are that the nut didn’t have a gun.
Those who say “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”
only have it half right: guns don’t kill
people, people with guns kill people, which is why society has a right and an
obligation to keep guns out of the hands of potential killers. Nothing in the
Constitution bans regulation of firearms.
And it’s easy to do: toughen gun control laws so that it’s
harder for mentally ill or unstable people to get them. Make sure that all gun
sales have a three-day wait for a background check on the purchaser that
includes going through the national registry, including all sales at guns shows.
Ban all Internet gun sales. Beef up the national and state gun registries.
Absolutely forbid concealed or unconcealed guns in schools, on university
campuses, at airports and in restaurants. Limit the number of guns and amount
of bullets someone can buy at one time. Limit the number of guns anyone can
own.
Unfortunately
state legislators haven’t learned yet that their job is to serve the people,
and not to line their campaign coffers with contributions from the National
Rifle Association.
In the first year after the Newtown shootings, states passed
70 laws loosening gun controls, compared to a mere 39 tightening restrictions
on gun purchase and ownership. Nothing demonstrates the power of crony
capitalism than the disgraceful way that states across the country are putting
their citizens in harm’s way by making it easier to buy guns and carry them in
the streets.
I figure that if we strengthened our gun control laws so
that they match other westernized countries, we would end up with more knife
fights and knife attacks. And that’s a good thing. We can’t totally eliminate
the crazies, the angry and the haters. But we can minimize the possibility of
them getting hold of weapons that can cause serious damage to multiple people
in seconds.
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