MASS KILLING: At least 9 people attacked, 4 stabbed to death in Rockford, Illinois neighborhood
• Mail carrier among the victims
• Suspect is in custody
• Motive unknown pic.twitter.com/TxD3dB7GuP
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) March 27, 2024
A lot of people like to say banning guns won’t stop mass killings such as stabbings, and the usual rebuttal is that someone with a knife can’t kill dozens of people as we’ve seen in the worst mass shootings. That’s probably true when it comes to the capabilities of knives as a weapon of violent assault, although there are some examples in other countries of stabbings with double-digit victims.
However, the overwhelming majority of mass shootings, even going by the more restrictive FBI definition that requires four or more killed, do not have dozens of victims. Most end up in that three to five killed range. And that’s very much in line with several knife-related mass killings we have seen.
Guns are obviously more capable than knives, but there are some tradeoffs. For example, people often miss when they are shooting a gun. But once a deranged person closes distance on you and is determined to stab you, if you have no way to defend yourself, you’re pretty much out of luck. They aren’t going to miss.
The comparison between the types of mass murders can’t help but be made.
If all the facts of the tragedy in Rockford were the same, but this lunatic had instead used a gun to kill four peopoe and injure seven more, we’d be getting tweets from politicians and gun control groups calling for stricter gun control laws, criticizing us for insisting on our Second Amendment rights.
But because a knife was used, we’ve seen minimal news coverage of the incident, and some condolences offered from politicians. There will be no broad calls for legislation, nor will they make anyone feel guilty for owning knives. There’s no authoritarian utility to a pass stabbing, so there will nothing similar to the usual anti-gun burst of energy.
See also the Waukesha Christmas parade car attack in which six people were killed and 62 more were injured. Or the Brownsville car attack, in which eight were killed and 10 were injured. Brownsville is an especially good example because it occurred the very next day after a mass shooting, also in Texas, and had an identical number of dead victims.
Guess which one got way more attention.
Konstadinos Moros is an Associate Attorney with Michel & Associates, a law firm in Long Beach that regularly represents the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) in its litigation efforts to restore the Second Amendment in California. You can find him on his Twitter handle @MorosKostas. To donate to CRPA or become a member, visit https://crpa.org/.
This post was adapted by SNW from tweets posted by Konstadinos Moros.
2 Responses
a few days before this knife wielding mass-killer did his heinous act, there was a knife attack at the Walmart Supercenter located at 3849 Northridge Drive in Rockford where an 18-year-old Walmart employee was stabbed and later died at the hospital.
Don’t you worry, after they collect all the guns (lol), they’ll move on to discussions of banning zombie knives and various other cutlery, axes and machetes. There are plenty of examples from across the pond and elsewhere like Okinawa (the whole reason for Karate existing).