Yesterday a man in Boise Idaho attacked a child’s birthday party with a knife. He stabbed six children between the ages of four and twelve, and three adults who ran to defend the children were also injured.
The offender is named Timmy Kinner, a man originally from LA, who was recently kicked out of his apartment complex in Boise. Although Police don’t yet have a motive figured out, they believe Kinner came back to the apartment to get revenge for being evicted, and targeted the birthday party in the process.
This story would be very different if he had been using a gun. It would be a story about six dead children, and three badly wounded or dead adults.
But, if one of those adults who ran in to defend their children had been holding a gun, that would have been a different story too. That would have been a story about a crazy, knife-wielding man shot dead at a local birthday party.
Still horrifying, but less horrifying than six wounded children and three wounded adults.
A gun would have stopped Timmy Kinner, more than likely. In fact, the only thing that can reliably stop a violent man with a knife is a violent man (or woman) with a gun. The gun is the great force-equalizer; it allows a 90 pound woman to defend herself effectively against a 200 pound man.
That’s why the gun laws we have in this country are good; they allow law-abiding citizens to defend themselves from violence like this, and try to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, like violent felons. That’s very different from the laws in other places, where people are effectively at the mercy of the biggest, fastest, and most violent members of their society.
In a society without guns, the biggest guy with a knife is king. (You only need to take a look at our prisons to see the truth of that.)
Sure gun laws are not always followed. The current background check laws don’t keep people from obtaining illegal guns on the black market, for example. And sometimes nutjobs do slip through the cracks.
The laws also don’t keep people from taking a steak knife and running wild at a children’s birthday party. Meaningfully, the laws against knife crimes don’t do much to stop those kinds of things either.
The point is that there are several different worlds in which we as a society have the option of living, realistically.
We can live in a world where no private US citizen has any guns (the most expensive and difficult option; confiscating all 310 million guns would be just about impossible).
In this scenario, as described above, whoever has the biggest muscles and the longest knife is now able to commit violent crimes at will, at least until the cops show up. (And that can take a while.) In that scenario, there’s no longer any force-equalizer for the common citizen. The weak and vulnerable will always be at the mercy of the ruthless and the strong. Not an ideal world.
We can live in a world where total confiscation has failed, but the only citizens with guns are those willing to break the law to obtain them, IE, criminals.
For obvious reasons, that world seems sub-optimal, maybe even worse than the first. But that’s the most likely scenario, if the gun-grabbing Dems get their way.
And lastly, we can live in a world, like the one we live in now, where gun restrictions are relatively light and law abiding citizens can easily obtain firearms, but criminals can, for the most part, easily obtain them too.
It’s a world in which, yes, gun violence does occur. But it’s also a world in which people are able to defend themselves. And it’s a world in which knife-attacks like the one in Boise yesterday are a rarity for a reason.
An armed citizenry can defend themselves, efficiently and well, against an attacker with a knife or an attacker with a gun. An unarmed citizenry cannot defend themselves at all, whether against a gunman or a knife-wielding nut.
A world in which people have the ability to effectively arm themselves, even if it’s one in which more crimes are committed with guns, must surely be preferable. Because in a world without guns, we would still have crime.
We would still have violent madmen looking to make a statement or feel a sense of cruel empowerment. And we would still have roughly the same number of them in our society, so we would have similar rates of crime.
Murderers would just be hacking innocents apart with machetes in place of shooting them.
And the innocents would be, largely, unable to fight back.
That’s the world that Democrats want you to live in when they spin you their stories about “sensible gun reform.” It’s all leading to confiscation folks, because the slippery slope is real. Guns make liberals uncomfortable, because they can’t stand the idea of the common man having the power to protect himself.
As elites, they demand that power for themselves. So they may say they’re not coming for the guns. But the intellectually honest ones will admit that, in time, yeah, they’d love to live in a gunless society.
By which they mean, whether they say it or not, “Yes, I’m a big fan of knife violence.”