Gun Control Didn’t Save These People: 33 Killed in Chinese Train Station Mass Stabbing

Gun control advocates try to paint gun availability and ownership as the main force behind mass killings in this country. They call for restrictions restrictions and more restrictions.

Just days ago, 10 people armed with knives at a southwestern China train station killed 33 people and wounded another 130 according to The Wall Street Journal.

All private ownership of guns is heavily regulated by law in the People’s Republic of China. Other than a few extremely limited exceptions, no one is allowed to privately own a firearm.

Mass stabbings happen in China from time-to-time, including in schools. A Chinese man stabbed eight children to death as they were waiting for their parents outside an elementary school in March 2010. Later that same month, another man broke into a Chinese primary school and stabbed 18 students and a teacher. The very next day in what officials deemed a potential copycat crime, yet another man locked himself inside a kindergarten class with a knife, killing four more kids and wounding another 28, leaving five in critical condition.

In fact, just before news of the Sandy Hook shooting hit here in America, another man walked into a Chinese elementary school armed with a kitchen knife and stabbed 23 children, cutting off ears and fingers. The media reported it was because he had been “psychologically affected” by the Mayan calendar predicting the end of the world.

Stabbings are also becoming a regular occurrence in the U.K., a country The Telegraph dubbed the “violent crime capital of Europe” in 2009, noting the country had one of the highest reported violence rates in the world — a per capita rate worse than South Africa, Australia, and yes, even America. Other crimes, such as rape, have also risen in the country.

I wrote about it in December 2012:

Robberies at knifepoint have apparently become a common news item in the U.K. Just a few weeks ago, a pregnant woman was stabbed during a knifepoint car robbery when she attempted to get into a cab in East London. The following week, a man was stabbed for his headphones during a robbery in Gloucester skate park. Prior to Thanksgiving, a man was found stabbed to death in an East London petrol station, and another man was stabbed in the stomach during an attempted robbery of his cell phone as he walked through Victoria Park, Ashford that same month. These are just a few examples.

If gun control — where law-abiding citizens are not allowed to own guns to protect themselves from criminals — automatically equaled less crime, shouldn’t England’s crime rates be much lower?

The U.K. has some estimated 60,000 stabbings a year and the rates continue to rise. British doctors even called for a banning of long kitchen knives in 2012 to help end the rash of stabbings. Having a pocket knife with a blade over three inches in public has already been banned there since 1988, but seemingly that has failed to help stop the stabbings.

Gun control advocates paint a picture of America as a crime-ridden country on the brink of insanity with a mass shooting every other five minutes, so everyone’s gun must be registered or relinquished, and the types of guns private citizens can legally own should be a short (if not empty) list.

I put together this chart based on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting data to show that, despite a population growth of over 20% and despite mainstream media scaremongering, crime rates in the U.S. have dropped significantly over the last two decades in every major crime category monitored by the bureau.

Dark figure of crime notwithstanding, the figures here would suggest a safer country overall, not more dangerous one.

But criminals ultimately do not follow laws anyway. That is why they are called criminals.

Most of the mass shootings that have occurred in this country have happened in “gun-free zones” and many times the guns were illegally obtained anyway. School shootings are actually rare in this country compared to other types of violence, but even if guns were taken out of the hands of private citizens, the horror stories out of China alone show that there is no way to truly stop random instances where an unbalanced person attacks a school and commits mass violence.

People don’t just go crazy and limit themselves to shooting places up. If someone wants to commit a violent act on a mass scale in a public place, that person will find a way without any regard for laws.

In fact, the worst mass school violence to ever occur in America was actually a bombing, not a shooting. On May 18, 1927, Andrew Kehoe of Bath Township, Michigan first murdered his family, then detonated a bomb in an elementary school, killing 38 elementary kids and six adults and injuring 59 other people. It is still the deadliest mass murder at a school in our nation’s history.

Besides, our government is armed to the teeth and acquiring more weaponry and ammunition all the time. Police forces in American cities are growing more and more militarized all the time. Banning guns or severely limiting what a private citizen can own would mean the only people with guns in this country would be a heavily centralized government and criminals (and the difference between the two is pretty hard to find).

This is the exact opposite of what our founding fathers envisioned when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were penned.