CNN
Wednesday's violent spree at the suburban Pittsburgh school ended with 20 students and one adult with stab wounds, according to police. Yet even as one doctor from Forbes Regional Hospital in nearby Monroeville described some of their injuries as life-threatening, another from the same facility said he expects all the victims to survive.
The fact that their prognosis wasn't worse and the fact that there weren't more victims are tributes to an assemblage of people who made a difference in ways big and small. These people stepped up in the face of confusion and terror to help each other, doing everything from pulling a fire alarm to tenderly nursing victims' wounds, to subduing the alleged attacker, Alex Hribal, 16, to now rallying to provide comfort to their neighbors.
One of the laughable arguments often proffered by the gun-rights fanatics is that if guns were completely banned unstable people would commit just as many murders and do just as much damage with knives or baseball bats or any other killing instrument. It's not about the tool, they say, it's about the person.
Well, when Adam Lanza did his thing, 28 people ended up dead and only 2 wounded (I think that's right). Young Alex Hribal wasn't able to rack up such a satisfactory tally in his attempt at infamy. He wounded about 20 people and killed none.
Except that as always, you're trying to generalize a particular vivid event. Most murders are one-on-one actions by a killer who knows the victim well.
ReplyDeleteSo? Are you saying that if there were only knife fights the dead count would be the same as the dead gun count, about 30,000 a year? Are people going to knife themselves to death? If people want to mass kill, there are better ways than guns, why don't they use those ways?
DeleteInteresting that you admit that some of the other ways are better than guns, anonymous. Does that mean that you want to limit their ability to get guns so that they start looking around and discovering the more efficient ways?
DeleteThere you go with your lies about me again Simon. I have said many times I am not for taking away the second amendment, or your right to buy, own, and use guns. Why do you guys have to lie to make your point? it makes your point worthless and makes you just liars. People (including me) don't believe liars, even when they tell the truth. It's the Chicken Little syndrome. The sky is not falling on your gun rights, and I use your own stance that says you are winning the battle for the pro gun side. Which only makes the cry that your gun rights are being taken away, a complete lie.
DeleteAnonymous, when you comment anonymously, it's difficult, if not impossible to know what you've said in the past.
DeleteI have seen that 30,000 number tossed around a lot here. Of that, some 2/3 are suicides, and as has been discussed many times, the Japanese find no difficulty in killing themselves without guns. We have ropes and garages here in America. Of the remaining one third, many of those deaths are done by someone the victim knows well. That suggests lots of opportunities to use some other means of killing.
The problem is not guns. It's violence and depression. Solve those, and leave our rights alone.
So a suicide by gun is not a gun shot death?
DeleteAmericans aren't killing themselves with ropes, knives, or any other means, at the rate of 30,000 per year. We are not Japanese. Your argument and comparison is, as usual, ridiculous.
If you have no clue what I've said in the past then of course just call me a liar, or falsely accuse me of something I did not say. That's the rational response when you have no clue what a person has said.
This is why I quote you guys say, in your own words, and even then you deny what you said, or claim you didn't mean that although the words were clear, English professor.
No wonder you can't properly interpret the clear wording of the second amendment, and twist it to mean what you want it to mean. That's what you do.
Greg and Simon, guns are the most efficient tool for killing oneself and others. What's so difficult about that?
Delete...and the most efficient tool for defending yourself and others. What's so difficult about that?
DeleteTS, I agree, more or less, but that's exactly the point. If they were used to protect life as many times as they were used to harm it, you'd be on to something. That's why you guys find it necessary to exaggerate and lie about the number of DGUs. Not Kurt, though. For him it doesn't matter if everyone on the planet took a bullet in the head - he'd still be preaching his gospel. But most reasonable people recognize that guns do far more harm than good and need to be better regulated.
DeleteI don't play the DGU count game either. As I explained to you many times, it's a false metric. I do things like look at murder rates compared to gun ownership and see that guns most definitely do not do more harm than good.
DeleteAside from that, it would be deplorable to take something good away from one person because you believe you are also taking something bad away from two people.
Mikeb, we cite the numbers from the CDC and the National Academies of Science, and you call those exaggerations and lies. You should look up what those words mean.
DeleteAs Greg said, you're generalizing from two events with a huge contrast. In Aurora, you had 80 people shot, only 12 of whom died. The recent Ft. Hood shooting also had significantly more injured than dead, as did the Empire State gunfight and other incidents.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, in this attack, we're lucky we didn't have a large number of dead. In this case, as the article you cited and others have noted, there would have been several deaths if it were not for quick reactions by everyone involved. Here, everyone kept their cool, teachers were going back for injured students, and teachers and students were doing first aid. Thank God so many of them knew what they were doing and reacted so fast--and that the Principle reacted so quickly, taking the student down after he had incapacitated the resource officer in that part of the school. Quick and correct reactions by all prevented this from being a bloodbath equal to or greater than Newtown.
As for your suggestion that it's laughable that people who want to go on rampages would do so without guns, this shows that the notion is not laughable. This guy tried knives, and he was stabbing rather than causing superficial slashes--a much more lethal technique that thankfully was frustrated by quick first aid and other reactions. As Anonymous pointed out, there exist other ways to kill people without using guns--ways more lethal than this.
The types of people doing this ARE the problem, and we do need to deal with them, not just try to take away one of their tools.
This also shows that the reaction of people is crucial to the outcome of these things. Newtown could have been worse, but for some of the reactions. The Knoxville Unitarian Church shooting and Tuscon could have been much worse than they were without quick reactions from the crowd. One of the early school shootings would have been worse, but two boy scouts and one or two of their friends jumped the guy shooting up the cafeteria, at least one of them taking a bullet doing it, but they stopped him. The guy at Appalachian School of Law was stopped by three students who ran, got guns from their vehicles, and stopped him before he made it through his kill list. Cho was kept out of one of the rooms he targeted because a professor sacrificed himself blocking the door. The shooter in Clackamas ran when he saw someone pointing a gun back at him. A shooter at a Knoxville mall was stopped and held for police by an Alderman with a CCW who was passing by when he started shooting. A school shooting in North East Tennessee was stopped before it began by a resource officer who wound up having to shoot the gunman when he couldn't be talked down. In Georgia, another shooting was stopped by Antoinette Tuff who thankfully managed to talk the shooter down.
In all of these cases, like the recent stabbing, killers were resisted on some level, both by armed and unarmed individuals, and that saved lives. In some cases, like the Virginia Tech shooting, more could have been saved had there been more courageous people like that one professor and they had gone on the offensive like the victims at Tuscon or the Unitarian Church.
Yeah, and you know what would save more lives? Proper gun control laws.
DeleteI wonder how many mass knife killings there are compared to mass gun killings? How many people knifed themselves to death compared to how many used a gun to kill themselves? Love those false comparisons.
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ReplyDeleteIn addition to trying to improve our systems for dealing with people with mental health issues, we need to praise and emphasize the people who show courage in these events--like the men throwing themselves in front of others in Aurora and the young men doing the same at the school in PA yesterday, like the professor who took down the knifeman, and the others who have taken down gunmen. We need to teach first aid so that people can aid each other as was done yesterday.
Additionally, I would say that we need to encourage people to sometimes react offensively. One session at a continuing education class I attended a bit over a year ago was on dealing with workplace violence. Most of the time was spent on designing policies to help identify the people who might commit violence and get them help. However, there was a 10 minute or so video that we watched which had been produced by the government--Can't remember if it was Department of Labor or a different department. The video's core was Run, Hide, Fight. Run away if you can, hide if you can't get away, and while hiding, grab anything you can use as a weapon, and fight with it if you are found.
This advice isn't the worst advice that can be given, but looking for something to fight with should be the first thing, even if it's just grabbing a hole punch or letter opener to use in case you accidentally run into the shooter while running. If more people grabbed the first improvised weapon possible, waited at the doorway, and jumped attackers as they came through, these attackers wouldn't get as far as many of them do, and we might just see a decline in such attacks because they wouldn't be able to count on experiencing their evil fantasy of running around stabbing or shooting fleeing victims.
I like it when the first weapon I can grab is the sidearm in my pocket or in my waistband.
DeleteI like that too, but sometimes it's not an option due to where one is. Employers, government rules, etc. There's still plenty a person with a will to live can grab hold of and use to fight for their life.
DeleteAlso, with some of these shootings happening in Schools where the kids are, of course, not going to be armed because they're kids, they can still find something to defend themselves with if there's no teacher or SRO on site--the kids in Norway threw rocks at the gunman there while they ran for their lives--disoriented him enough that a group of them got away and were able to hide out in a cave and save some others.
True, that. It's just curious that these gun control freaks attribute magical powers to firearms, except when they're in the hands of good people.
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