[pielud]

Why wouldn't he just grab a knife from his kitchen? Or run them down with his car? Or a bat? Or set their house on fire?

Not having a gun isn't going to stop a person who wants to hurt someone else from doing it. It's just a tool.

[yason]

He probably would but the probability of actually killing the victim would be much lower.

You can kill a lot more people more easily and more accidentally with a gun and also with quite a high probability compared to a knife. Guns just require one click to inflict a fatal wound if you know the tinies imaginable bit of knowledge of where to aim.

So you can just shoot another person off the bat but with a knife or another close-range weapon you have someone who realizes that a) you have a knife and b) you intend to fatally use it against him. That means combat.

I don't know which person attacked is more determined or more difficult to stop, a parent with kids or a person who's just running for life but they're both damn fucking hard. You will have to catch your victim first and if you just did, s/he will try nothing but escape again.

Now, with a knife (or a bat or...) you're likely to be able to wound that other person but actually killing him/her always requires an extra mile. All kinds of odds are stacked against not only the victim but the attacker as well, and as stabbing requires an intimate range and takes time, the outcome is far from certain unless you're really, really good.

I'd much rather be attacked by an amateur knifer than an amateur gunner.

[InclinedPlane]

This just isn't true. The easiest way to kill a lot of people quickly (or even semi-accidentally) is with arson.

[grecy]

> Why wouldn't he just grab a knife from his kitchen? Or run them down with his car? Or a bat? Or set their house on fire?

How many people would he kill compared to a high-caliber semi-automatic assault rifle with 1000+ rounds of ammo?

> It's just a tool.

A tool that enables the holder to seriously injure or kill many more people than other readily available tools.

[cobrausn]

Stop saying '1000+ rounds of ammo', as it makes you sound like the alarmist you are.

Point of fact - a loaded magazine for an AR-15 weighs in at approximately one pound. To carry '1000+ rounds of ammo', you would need to carry something like 30 magazines. Try it sometime - that only happens in video games for a reason.

A large truck driven through a crowded market could kill many more people than your average looney with a semi-automatic rifle. These highly publicized events make up only a tiny fraction of the number of homicides we experience per year, most of which only use a few bullets, and not from a 'high-caliber semi-automatic assault rifle'. Calm down.

[Symmetry]

In this particular example he had a finite list of people he wanted to kill in either case, so if moderately athletic guy who's for-armed himself with a baseball bat and knife I'd expect him to be able to murder a person or small number of people with or without a gun.

As to someone who's really crazy and wants to kill as many people as possible, well, people who use bombs seem be much more deadly than people who use guns, so I'd be nervous about banning guns for fear of channeling them into less visceral but more deadly sorts of mayhem.