As reported, 29 kindergartners and 3 adults in Beijing, China – where firearms are strictly banned – were stabbed by a man armed with an 8″ knife:
BEIJING – The screams of the 4-year-olds inside the kindergarten could be heard out in the street. When people ran in to investigate, they found what one witness said was a scene “too horrible to imagine” — blood everywhere as a knife-wielding man slashed 29 children, two teachers and a security guard Thursday in the second such school attack in China in two days. . . Experts called it a copycat rampage triggered by similar incidents Wednesday and last month. They said the wave of school attacks falls amid poor care for the mentally unstable and growing feelings of social injustice in the fast-changing country. . . The official Xinhua News Agency identified the attacker as Xu Yuyuan, a 47-year-old unemployed man using an eight-inch (20-centimeter) knife. No motive was given. . . [A delivery man reportedly used a fire extinguisher to finally stop the attacker].
This attack bears striking similarity to to a mass-stabbing about a month ago, in which 8 children were stabbed to death and 5 more were wounded, allegedly by a disgruntled former medical worker in China’s capital city of Beijing. Indeed, mass stabbings happen around the world, with this attack upon nursery children in Belgium, this mass stabbing of Chinese police officers, and this stabbing and vehicular attack in Japan serving as a few terrible examples.
The sad fact is that due to mental illness, a sadistic desire to hurt innocent people, or some other reason, there are members of society who will go on killing sprees. Whether they use a gun, a knife, a car, or some other tool, chances are they will succeed at harming many innocent people – unless there is an armed citizen nearby to quickly put a stop to their rampage.
Laws that ban gun (or ban knives) don’t stop these sort of crimes, for the simple reason that a person who willing to commit mass murder will not think twice about breaking a law that tells them not to carry a weapon. The result is that such weapons control laws only disarm the law abiding people who weren’t going to commit a crime in the first place, ensuring that those citizens are defenseless when the still-armed criminal attacks.
I wonder how many fewer children would have been stabbed, had the teachers and other responsible adults at this Chinese school been armed for self defense?