[hermitdev]

It's not just this tragedy, it's any tragedy. Every time there's a mass shooting, people use it as a rallying cry for more gun control, rather than focusing on fixing the issues that actually led to the violence (usually severe mental health issues), as if people haven't used knives or vehicles to commit mass murder/violence. Never let a good tragedy go to waste, so the saying goes.

[krferriter]

A person with a few full magazines and a semiauto rifle in a crowded place, and not much concern about surviving, can kill dozens of people in a couple minutes before there's any chance of someone else with a gun being able to stop them. I'm not aware of someone doing this with a knife. Seems like it's always a gun. Probably because a gun makes it really easy to kill people quickly.

[WillPostForFood]

I'm not aware of someone doing this with a knife

Guns are clearly more deadly than knives, so I am not intending to equate them, but mass casualty knife attacks also happen.

10 dead, 15 hospitalized in Canada mass stabbing attacks, police say:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/canada-stabbing-saskatchewan-de...

Six people were killed and 14 injured after a knife-wielding man stabbed passersby on a pedestrian shopping street in the eastern Chinese city of Anqing:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/09/china/china-knife-attacks-mic...

At least 15 killed, dozens injured in knifing near Tokyo

https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/nation-world/2016/07...

[atchoo]

I don't consider two of those to be good comparisons to mass shootings of the "kill dozens of people in a couple minutes" variety.

The Saskatchewan stabbings were attacks at 13 separate locations across a sparsely populated reservation rather than a single mass casualty event.

The Sagamihara stabbings were attacks on sleeping disabled patients inside a care home. It reminds me more of Angel of Death type mass killings (by nurses / doctors). He considered it to be euthanasia and the weapon could have been a pillow - the mass killing was not down to the deadliness of the weapon but the passivity of the victims.

The Anqing attack is a better example - a single event against conscious victims. Nevertheless, mass stabbings across the whole globe are rarer than the daily mass shootings in the US.

[cmh89]

The person you replied to said

"A person with a few full magazines and a semiauto rifle in a crowded place, and not much concern about surviving, can kill dozens of people in a couple minutes before there's any chance of someone else with a gun being able to stop them. I'm not aware of someone doing this with a knife.

The Canadian incident took place over days and 13 different locations. The other two incidents don't say how long they took but it just takes way longer to kill people with a knife than a gun.

[comte7092]

> usually severe mental health issues

Do you have a citation on that?

I am not fully researched on this topic, but as a lay observer it appear that the gun rights side basically categorizes anyone who is willing to commit a mass shooting as mentally ill, and hence every mass shooting is a result of mental illness by definition. But it does not follow that mass shooters are mentally ill by any professional standards.

[ruph123]

> Every time there's a mass shooting [...]

If this is a valid premise, then you know you are doing something wrong as a society. Mass shootings are common place in the US (with currently 177 mass shootings this year so far). This is not normal.

[dmoy]

It depends entirely on the definition of mass shooting.

If you use the FBI's active shooting definition, there's closer to 15-20 per year on a 20 year average.

https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-incidents...

If you use the GVA definition, which includes a whole lot of other things, then yes. But the GVA's dataset is somewhat suspect.

For example this qualifies as a mass shooting in the GVA:

https://www.atlantapd.org/Home/Components/News/News/4031/631

[txsoftwaredev]

US isn't even close to the top of the list for mass shootings in the world and it is not "common place". Most "mass" shootings, which could be just three individuals, are gang related and added to the data for mass shootings.

[dmoy]

Not even three. GVA includes a lot of incidents with just two individuals being shot, so long as at least two other people are present for the incident.

[mhoad]

It’s actually nothing like that at all. People keep bringing it up because the US has the second highest number of gun related deaths of any country in the entire world.

[bryanlarsen]

hermitdev claimed that if guns weren't available, people would use knives or cars instead. So the fact that gun related deaths are higher in the US is irrelevant. And they do have a point: knife murders are more common in Europe than they are in the US.

But not by much. The fact that the murder rate in the US is 7X the murder rate in Europe is a much more relevant statistic.

[mhoad]

The point you seem to be making doesn’t really hold up to even a light level of scrutiny.

There is not any evidence what so ever that a person who might commit a murder with a gun would just use the next available option to them such as a knife. That was something that was just introduced to the discussion as a fact when in reality it’s something you have made up.

In fact it’s immediately clear that to most people they are two very different things precisely because one of them is literally just pushing a button.

There is a reason why the murder rate is 7x higher because the access to guns requires a much lower buy in to commit the act in the first place.

Hence why people argue for stricter gun control laws. Mass access is precisely the problem.

[MrOwnPut]

so you think these gangs are just going to not kill people anymore because all guns magically disappeared?

you do know when they don't have access to guns in prison they then shank people with whatever they can sharpen, right?

[Jochim]

There's much less opportunity to attack someone with a knife and it involves a lot more personal risk. You're likely to get stabbed back unless they're totally unprepared. It's much more difficult to do a "drive by knifing".

[MrOwnPut]

It's also a lot harder to defend yourself without a gun.

Especially if you're physically weaker.

[mhoad]

You are responding to a claim that nobody made and then introducing another “fact” that isn’t actually relevant to the conversation.

The argument isn’t that all murder stops. It’s that it goes down, dramatically when you remove guns from the equation.

[MrOwnPut]

1. You can't remove all guns, you can only remove the legal ones.

2. If you had the ability to remove illegal guns from society you would have had the ability to remove the criminals in the first place.

3. Even if you did remove the millions of guns and prevent manufacturing / imports (even though you can't for drugs) you don't know for certain murders will go down. These people are ruthless. Jumping people with machetes is always an option. It may be worse since guns are an equalizer and let people defend themselves. You're a lot less likely to run up on someone when you know they have a gun.

[bryanlarsen]

> The point you seem to be making doesn’t really hold up to even a light level of scrutiny.

What point do you think I'm making? Because I think you're trying to reiterate the same point.

[ToValueFunfetti]

~25% of the murders in the US are already committed without guns, so even if you removed gun crime outright and no one decided to commit the same crime with a different weapon, the US would still have ~2x the murder rate of Europe. Not that this is a case against gun control, as we're still (very theoretically) saving ~15,000 lives a year. But it does suggest that there is a cause for the differing rates that is not related to guns.

[rubyn00bie]

Sources please. This reads like a NRA ad full of lies.

[ToValueFunfetti]

Here's the murder weapon statistics for 2019 from the FBI[1]. This only includes homicides for which the weapon is known. We'll assume that the rest match the distribution, though I suspect if you can't identify the weapon, there probably aren't bullet holes.

Summing total homicides gives 13,927. Summing total firearm homicides gives 10,258. 10,258/13,927 = 77.15%. I admit I did not do initially do that work and instead summed percentages from this infographic[2], arriving at 26.3% non-firearm homicide. I can't explain the discrepancy, as they point to the same data. The total homicide count is 5 higher on the FBI site, so possibly the page was updated later on. I point this out to clarify that I rounded the percentage down, which is why I felt comfortable with .25 * 7 ~= 2, though the answer with the new percentage is 1.59. I'd round to 1.5 if I did it again.

If you want a source for Europe's homicide rate being 1/7 that of the US, you'll have to ask the person I was replying to. Wikipedia[3] says Europe's murder rate is 3.0 and the US is 6.5, but I expect the person here was restricting it to the EU or something else along those lines (also various sources differ, and it's something that changes over time). I don't think the restriction changes either of our points, as long as the 7x number does really exist.

I can't recall ever having seen an NRA ad but I don't imagine my comment sounds anything like one. If the NRA really does say in their ads that they're not making a case against gun control and that it could save 15,000 lives a year, I don't have a problem sounding like them.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[2] https://infographicjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/we...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

[dmoy]

FBI:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

It's about 28-35% of homicides without guns

[dmoy]

(note you may also be interested to learn from that table that knives are used ~5x more frequently than all rifles in homicide)

[bigtex88]

It's a lot harder to murder a large number of people with a knife than a gun.

[MrOwnPut]

what about a van? and there's been plenty of mass stabbings.

focus on getting rid of gangs, your gun murder rate will plummet.

noone seems to care about the 20-60 shootings per day in gun-free Chicago.

all of those criminals don't seem to respect the gun laws...

the only thing that happens when you restrict guns in the US is you take away the ability for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves.

[mhoad]

And yet… there’s no vehicular homicide crime wave but 8/10 murders in the country involve a gun https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-da...

[SV_BubbleTime]

"Where effective tool is available it's used"

Isn't really the gotcha you might think.

We know who uses guns to kill people, we know who they kill. You don't see those on the news because no one wants to talk about it.

Of the 10,000 murders or so per year with firearms, over 66% are drug and gang related.

[suzzer99]

And yet the US is the only place where mass shootings resulting in 5+ deaths regularly happen.