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...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
you do know when they don't have access to guns in prison they then shank people with whatever they can sharpen, right?
Especially if you're physically weaker.
The argument isn’t that all murder stops. It’s that it goes down, dramatically when you remove guns from the equation.
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.
What point do you think I'm making? Because I think you're trying to reiterate the same point.
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...
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
It's about 28-35% of homicides without guns
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.
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.
It's the type of gangs in America, it's not about "gang membership" or whatever metric you're trying to throw out.
They shank people with tooth brushes in prison. MS-13 decapitates people with axes. It's the gangs, not the guns.
Chicago and many cities in America would be safer with more legal guns, less gangsters.
It’s just so all over the place responding to arguments that no one ever made with a series of facts you seem to have taken from who knows where.
I think you may want to look at history who confiscates guns.