They are not necessary to commit violent acts, perhaps, but people intent on assaulting others can and do kill a lot more people a lot more quickly with guns--especially with large-capacity semi-automatic weapons of the sort that were used in the Newtown and Aurora massacres. In the Newtown slaughter, all but one of the 27 shooting victims died. In the Jiangsu Province attack reported in the NY Times article, the number of victims was about the same--31, but apparently no one died. Two other factors: armed with large-capacity semi-automatic guns, the attacker doesn't have to be close to his victims (you can run away from a knife wielder); and because of the need for proximity, it takes longer to harm a lot of people, and a knife wielder is easier to subdue. In the Aurora slaughter, all the shots were fired within the space of a minute. In the Newtown slaughter, it took just a few minutes for the gunman to fire over 100 rounds.
If you compare crime statistics of the US with places like Canada, Australia and the UK, you see that these countries all have about the same assault rates. That is, people are pretty much equally inclined to violent acts in these 4 countries. But the homicide rates are much higher in the US, because of much greater use of guns in assaults. So guns do more than "help"; they dramatically increase the deaths arising from assaults, to say nothing of serious injuries. ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] on behalf of Jim Devine [[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2012 3:19 PM To: Pen-l Subject: [Pen-l] guns may help, but they're not necessary Attacker Stabs 28 Chinese Children By MICHAEL WINES Published: April 29, 2010 New York TIMES / http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/world/asia/30china.html BEIJING — An unemployed man entered a kindergarten in Jiangsu Province in eastern China on Thursday morning and stabbed 28 kindergarten students and three adults, critically wounding at least five children, local authorities and state news agencies reported. It was the second mass stabbing of students in two days, and the third in less than a month. Many of the wounded children were just 4 years old and shared the same classroom, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. Police officers identified the assailant as Xu Yuyuan, a 47-year-old former insurance agent. According to Xinhua, he began attacking children with a knife about eight inches long around 9 a.m. at the Zhongxin Kindergarten, a middle-class school in Taixing, about 570 miles southeast of Beijing. He also wounded two teachers and a security guard. Little other information was immediately available. Taixing propaganda officials did not respond to telephone calls. Thursday’s attack occurred a day after a 33-year-old man in the southern province of Guangdong stabbed 15 fourth and fifth graders at a primary school in Leizhou. None of those students were seriously wounded. The authorities said that attacker, identified as Chen Kangbing, had taught at a nearby school but had been on leave since 2006, apparently because of mental illness. On March 23, Zheng Minsheng, 42, stabbed eight primary school students to death in Fujian Province, also on China’s east coast. Some news reports stated that Mr. Zheng also had mental problems, but most state media said no such evidence existed. Mental illness remains a closeted topic in modern China, and neither medication nor modern psychiatric treatment is widely used. An analysis of mental health issues in four Chinese provinces, published in June in the British medical journal The Lancet, estimated that 91 percent of the 173 million Chinese adults that are believed to suffer mental problems never receive professional help. Mr. Zheng’s attack stirred calls for a school safety crackdown. Mr. Zheng was executed on Wednesday after what one legal expert, He Weifang, a former Peking University law professor and civil rights advocate, said was an unusually speedy trial. There was no immediate explanation as to why the three attackers chose young students as their targets. While assaults in schools are not particularly common, an eerily similar series of five knife attacks took place in August and September 2004 in schools and a child care center. Three of the attacks occurred on China’s east coast. In February 2008, two students at another Leizhou school were stabbed to death by a former student who then killed himself by jumping off the school building. In the current string of knifings, which took place hundreds of miles apart, “probably there was some kind of copycat element,” Liu Jianqing, a professor of criminal psychology at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, said Thursday. “People in similar predicaments emulate this because of the impact of the mass media these days.” The assaults were also likely to be acts of self-destruction by the attackers, he said, because such crimes stand a high chance of drawing a death sentence. Some experts like Mr. He said that beyond mental illness, rising strains in China’s fast-changing society might have a role in the growing number of violent crimes. Most school assaults have occurred on the east coast, where both the cost of living and income inequality are high. The man executed on Wednesday, Mr. Zheng, wanted revenge on “rich” and “powerful officials” in Nanping, where he lived, Xinhua said, quoting his neighbors. An earlier version of this article misidentified the province where Leizhou is located. It is in Guangdong Province, not Shandong. An earlier version of this article also misstated the percentage of mentally ill people thought not to have received professional help in China. The correct figure is 91 percent, not 98 percent. Zhang Jing, Li Bibo and Xiyun Yang contributed research. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
