Is Knife Control Next?

[93henfan]

warms the heart to see all these rugged individual NRA types talking about spending government money on mental health.

Yeah, sort of like all these liberal ACLU types talking about taking away constitutional rights.

[BlueHen86]

I disagree. It's not a fair comparison. With guns out of the picture, knives are likely the preferred weapon of choice in the UK. In the US you have a choice of using a gun or a knife. Also, it's much easier to get a knife than it is to get a gun (even in the US), so I would expect there to be a higher instance of knife crime. The article you linked was rigged, which is no surprise since the author clearly has an anti-gun control stance.

I will say again, I'm not in favor of taking guns away from law abiding citizens, but trying to equate gun violence to other things (like knives or cars) is irrelevant and probably hurts the anti-gun control position. You aren't going to win an argument that knives are more dangerous than guns.

I also don't think it's a slippery slope. Sure all the things you mentioned can hurt people, but not nearly effectively as guns. I don't think there has been a mass murder using rocks since Thak and Trogg knocked off a clan of Neanderthals back when global warming ended the ice age.

You're either not hearing me or I'm not making my point very well. I acknowledge that guns are more dangerous than knives, rocks, shovels, etc. and I didn't point to that article as definitive proof that blades beat bullets - I don't even thing the author believed that. But you ban guns as the UK did and people go for the next best thing, to which the government then begins to legislate legality as below:

https://www.gov.uk/find-out-if-i-can-bu ... ry-a-knife" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

What's next? Ban guns and knives (or impose restrictions that are too prohibitive) and that crazy someone picks some other way of committing a mass murder. Anthrax? Times Square car bombs? Subway bombings? IED's? The point is you simply can't legislate the problems and the crazies away - gun bans or prohibition may mitigate the problems to an extent, but where do you stop? That's the slippery slope.
Most of the crazies that do this sort of thing end up dead by their own hand or suicide by cop - the FBI manages to stop a lot of these but they'll slip through on occasion.

I think you are I agree on gun control, but we disagree on this argument. Using the rationale you seem to be advocating, we might as well not put locks on doors since intruders will find another way in.

There is more to gun ownership and access than just protecting ourselves from crazies. If you focus the argument only on protection from crazy people I think you risk losing the argument. Guns offer an attractive combination of availability and destructive power, they are easy to get and you can kill a lot of people with very little planning. Knives may be easier to get, but the death toll probably won't be very high. Bombs and anthrax may have a high death toll, but they require expertise and raw materials that not everyone can get.

[Ibanez]

There was an astute politician on CNN today that stated, " We should worry more about the people then the weapon." He was advocating mental health initiatives.

Our government isn't really very good at root cause analysis, but rather putting a band-aid on a problem.

You're telling me. Lol. One of my duties is Risk Management and these people don't understand the root cause of their problems.

[Screamin_Eagle174]

If we're not going to address the "crazy" issue we have, then we need to address the gun issue we have.

Crazy with knives (yesterday) is a much better proposition than crazy with guns (Newtown).

There was an astute politician on CNN today that stated, " We should worry more about the people then the weapon." He was advocating mental health initiatives.

We should be worrying about and addressing both. The problem is finding legislation that adequately balances the protection civil liberties of the people while at the same time preventing individuals from using those civil liberties to kill, hurt, or infringe upon the rights of others. There's no easy answer, because the extremists on both sides won't allow for any compromise.