Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Guns Don't Kill People, Knives Do

In Japan a young man decided it would be a good idea to just start stabbing people in the street. Apparently you don't have to have access to guns in order to kill a bunch of people. In fact according to the article mass stabbings are starting to become more popular in Japan. There are very heavy restrictions on guns in Japan and amazingly enough, they are still able to kill each other.

I have always been confused by the idea that limiting everyone's access to weapons will make crazy people not want to kill people. Japan is now considering limiting the size of the blade a person can carry.

"Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura told reporters Monday the government was considering tightening restrictions on large-bladed survival knives like the one apparently used in the attack, which had a 13-centimeter blade and is easily available in stores."

I do not get this concept. If a person is willing to go out and kill lots of random people, which by the way is already illegal, why would they be deterred by the weapon of choice also being illegal? Do crazy people actually sit there and think to themselves, "Gee, I really want to stab a bunch of people, but knives of the appropriate size are illegal, whatever shall I do?"

2 comments:

BobG said...

A 13cm knife is a large blade? That's only a little over 5". What kind of idiots think they can regulate knives? If people can make them in federal prisons, how can you control it in a free population? Hell, anything harder than a piece of pine will hold an edge and a point long enough to commit mayhem.

Mike W. said...

Prisons are probably the most tightly controlled environments in the world and that doesn't stop bad people from fashioning weapons and killing eachother.

As far as this question.

" What kind of idiots think they can regulate knives?"

The same kind of idiots who think they can regulate guns in order to stop crime. Same philosophy, same outcome, different inanimate object.