[colinmorelli]

This narrative isn't helpful. Even in this specific case, it's extremely unlikely anyone would have been able to get close enough to him with a knife to kill him without someone noticing.

Guns allow you to kill 1) multiple people, 2) from a distance, and 3) with nobody aware of the imminent threat.

Of course other weapons can also be used to harm people. Of course no solution is perfect. But it's absolutely incorrect to say "the problem isn't so much the tools." The tools undeniably and irrefutably play a role in every study that has ever been conducted on this topic.

See here for the impact of Australia's gun buyback program, which saw zero mass shootings in a decade after their removal, after 13 mass shootings in the 18 years prior the removal, as well as an accelerated decline in firearm deaths and suicides: https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/12/6/365

[carlosjobim]

> it's extremely unlikely anyone would have been able to get close enough to him with a knife to kill him without someone noticing.

What do you mean? If you go to any public place in the world, you can get very close to hundreds of people in a very short time. Knife assassinations happen all the time.

[colinmorelli]

> in this specific case

You could have quoted the beginning of the sentence, where the point was about this specific case, and how in this particular case, a gun clearly allowed an assassination that would have been challenging to pull off with a knife.

That is not a way as saying killing someone with a knife is impossible. It's a way of saying that guns allow you to kill people in ways and distances that knives do not.

[carlosjobim]

But what makes this case different? Somebody with a knife could have gotten close to him.

[vlovich123]

While true, Australia reclaimed ~650k guns by 1997 and then another ~70k handguns in 2003. By comparison the US is estimated to have around 400M guns, with law enforcement alone having 5M guns (as the “fast and furious” scandal showed, law enforcement guns often end up in the hands of criminals as well).

I don’t know what the answer is for reclaiming the guns, but I think logistically it’ll be hard to implement in the USA even if there wasn’t bad faith attempts to try to thwart regulation (and arguing that there’s still violence with knives and guns aren’t the problem is definitely bad faith/uneducated arguments)

[colinmorelli]

Yeah I'm not suggesting the same process could apply in the US, I'm just trying to aggressively refute the point that guns are not the problem (or, at least, a major component of it). We need to be creative about solutions, but people have to want to find a solution to be creative about them, and right now many do not.

[vlovich123]

On that we’re 100% agreed. The science is exceedingly clear that guns are the reason for so much gun violence and mass shootings (which makes sense since without guns you couldn’t have either of those by definition).