Seven children and a teacher stabbed to death with meat cleaver in China (No gun used)

Seven children and a teacher were hacked to death with a meat cleaver in an attack on a kindergarten in north-west China today.

After killing the five boys, two girls and their teacher, 48-year-old Wu Huanmin went home and committed suicide.

The attack is the latest in a string of assaults on schools that has raised public alarm about the government's grip on order.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1277724/Seven-children-hacked-death-school-China.html

Don't worry, the police are there to protect you. :crazy:

not

:puke:

Would you prefer that police arm themselves with meat cleavers?

Really silly question, that. What you seem to want is that the kindergarten teacher (and the children?) has a gun. Try explaining that one to parents.

And I say this is as someone who has a four year-old in part-time day care. After the Dendermonde attack early last year, I was definitely worried about copycatting, and while I don't actively advocate arming staff or teachers, I would have had absolutely no objection if the director and/or assistant director kept a large-caliber handgun in a quick-access lock box in the office and knew how to use it.

in China. To use it to score points on your issue--no matter how one feels about guns-- is truly disgusting.

I can only hope that China is able to act to stop similar copycat acts. Those poor children.... their poor parents...

Many, MANY posters on this board insist that if guns were banned, this sort of thing wouldn't happen.
WE keep saying, if guns were banned, the bad guys would still find ways to kill. This proves the point. Nothing more, nothing less.

it's because of cowardly "who me?" posts like the one above.

You used this senseless tragedy to score points in your endless evangelism for gun ownership. Now you get called on it and you somehow can't find the sack to admit what you just did. Pathetic.

You have your utopian gun free society there, yet this kids still wind up dead regardless the weapon used.

Are you now ready to own it? Or do you still want to pretend you didn't do what you just did?

Guns are illegal in China yet these kids still died. The point is bad guys kill, even in a utopian society where guns are banned.

:rofl:

Someone here certainly is hopeless...

Real safe place to be.

So what's yer point? Does my stupid comparison make as much sense as your stupid comparison? Yeah, exactly as much sense.

and hasn't been for decades. They aren't part of the story. China is a gun-free society, with fierce government control, yet these crimes still occur.

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

wrong, your premise is that government control of guns is bad because it precludes protecting oneself from those who would do harm to you and that there are always bad people with or without guns.

It is an oft repeated theme that "if the teacher/students/private citizen were armed they could have prevented/limited the violence." This is what I took from the OP.

Somalia, on the other hand has no government control of guns, therefore there should be no violence because everybody is armed and presumably that frightens others into not using their guns against everyone else.

Doesn't seem to work out that way.

Can't have it both ways: government restriction of guns is bad, i.e. China but no government control of guns is not germane, i.e. Somolia. Some advocate for complete laisse faire regarding guns but choose to ignore examples of what happens in that case, i.e. Somolia or a host of other third world countries without effective government.

Frankly, neither situation is applicable to our situation in the U.S. There is a saying in legal circles, "Hard cases make bad law," meaning that to extrapolate from a single situation like the one in China to the gestalt isn't appropriate and will create more problems than it solves.

I have not suggested he should have had a gun, so your supposition is incorrect. Guns are illegal in China. That's the law.

My premise is simply this: Absent guns, as in China, bad guys will use other means to kill. IOW, it's not the tool that's the problem, it's the person using it.

However, if guns are just another tool why not regulate them and their use? They're just a tool after all and it is obvious that one tool is as bad as another in some people's hands.

To say that violence will happen with or with out guns is overstating the obvious but to say that because violence will happen anyway we should make no effort to minimize it is tantamount to saying that laws don't prevent murder, so we should just legalize it.

Where I am there are restrictions on:

guns

knives

clubs

all martial arts weapons (throwing stars, nun-chucks etc)

fire works

dry ice bombs

gasoline in some instances

"any device that propels a projectile with explosive propellant" (zip guns, even one that used hairspray and shoots a ping pong ball).

and "things deemed a threat to public safety". Just try carrying a 10 inch chef's knife down any city street and see if the local constabulary might consider it a threat.

Guns aren't singled out for regulation. Every tool that can reasonably used for mayhem is also regulated. Why? Because it is impossible to determine who will do what in advance, we have no Minority Report, so regulations are designed to limit mayhem as much as possible.

The whole "guns don't kill, people kill" is a fallacious argument.

There are currently over 17,000 laws on the books regulating guns and their use. How much more regulation will be enough?

The first is that the gun lobby manages to insert language in most of them that makes them difficult if not impossible to enforce.

The second is that there isn't enough money or manpower devoted to actually attempting to enforce them.

Most of the firearms used by the drug cartels along the US/Mexico border come from licensed FFLs who knowingly sell guns that will cross the border in violation of those 17,000 laws. However, if the buyer is a straw buyer who meets the strict definition of the law the guns go out the door anyway. Nobody is forced to sell anything to any customer but still the guns go out the door "legally".

It is illegal to have handguns inside the city limits of Chicago (I think, maybe a different city), yet licensed FFLs just outside the city limits routinely sell to individuals using ID that proves they live inside the city. Supposedly it is illegal for FFLs to knowingly sell guns in violation of local laws yet in this case the seller knows the home address of the buyer and knows it is illegal for him to posses the firearm but because the law does not apply to those stores outside the city limits the transaction is "legal".

As for manpower, the BATF&E is supposed to interview prospective 03 FFLs. I didn't even get a phone call, the license just showed up in the mail.

The argument of "how much is enough" is as tired as "guns don't kill, people do."

.. why push for more laws that would arguably be just as laxly enforced?

Re the two scenarios you mention:

re TX- there are already laws in place to make straw buying illegal. That sounds like an enforcement issue. There was recently a bust in El Paso for just such activity. (This disregards the unproven assertion you make about the majority of firearms used in MX coming from the civilian US market. Setting it aside, not agreeing with it.)

re Chicago- It's possession in Chicago, not surrounding areas, that's illegal. How is a gun dealer supposed to know if a person is keeping his legal handgun in his vacation cabin on Senachwine Lake, or would take it into Chicago? People in Chicago do go elsewhere for vacation, and may engage in legal sporting activities there.

Guns aren't singled out for regulation. Every tool that can reasonably used for mayhem is also regulated. Why? Because it is impossible to determine who will do what in advance, we have no Minority Report, so regulations are designed to limit mayhem as much as possible.

screwdrivers? baseball bats? tire irons? a roll of quarters wrapped in a sock? Any of these can be reasonably used for mayhem, yet they aren't regulated.

My gun just sits there and doesn't bother anyone. Someone must pick it up and MUST pull the trigger for any mayhem to ensue. It's the person, not the tool. Your opinion differs, no harm, no foul.

Well, yeah they are. Anything perceived by law enforcement to be a risk to the public safety is covered. Again, try carrying a 10 inch chef's knife on the subway. Or a screwdriver. Or anything else that might be deemed a menace to public safety. It's all covered in the statutes somewhere.

If your gun is safe in it's happy place, good for it. Me, I don't give a hoot about your gun. I do care a bit about the mass transfer of weaponry to people who really have no business with long distance dogs (barks here, bites there).

Don't bother asking what I'd do 'cause you really don't want to hear.

As far as I can tell, the self-defense advocates discuss the facts of the OP, and refrain from self righteous
moralizing about the temerity of the poster to bring up said facts.

"You used this senseless tragedy to score points in your endless evangelism against gun ownership."


Sauce for goose, meet gander.

Some of us have the minimal courage it takes to stand behind what we say on an anonymous discussion board.

Their cowardice is on display here every day, between their hit-and-run snipes and refusal to enter conversations which involve some actual knowledge about the gun violence/gun control issue.

:eyes:

OP is attempting to score points with a tragic circumstance, the fact that you're shouting about it is hypocritical as hell, since the pro-control team is notorious for this behaviour. Hell..........there is one pro-control member of the forum who posts NOTHING BUT gun related deaths!

Scoring points from tragedy is in fact the primary tactic of the pro-control crowd, NOT the RKBA crowd. And for good reason. Since it's hard to rationally explain the need for more gun control legislation while gun accidents and deaths are DECREASING while the gun stock is INCREASING it's necessary to deceive the public into believing that gun violence is escalating rather than diminishing. What better way to do that than emphasize gun related deaths while suppressing the fact gun related violence has actually been on the decline while more Americans choose to arm themselves.

That little string of letters on the right-hand side of the page? That's the handle of the poster who replied. You might want to correlate that with what's being said before you start the wrong argument with the wrong people.

The only thing I'm complaining about is the poster's lack of stones when he denies he did exactly what he just did. It's a frustrating tactic that seems to be all-to-common in the gungeon.

Doesn't change the fact that you called out shadowrider for a crime that is the pro-control movements bread and butter.

Read my post again. What's the main topic? Is it shadowrider using a tragedy to score points or that he denied doing it?

I'm at complete liberty to respond to whatever you post, in this case:

"You used this senseless tragedy to score points in your endless evangelism for gun ownership".

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

No where in this thread did I say the teacher should have been armed (which, I agree, would underscore your point). I never said China was wrong for their anti-gun policy and I certainly never suggested the kids be armed.

I said, guns are illegal in China, are tightly regulated, yet this guy killed a bunch of defenseless kids, without the use of one.

If guns are not available, bad guys will still find ways to kill. That's the point.

How, exactly, were we supposed to "include you in the conversation"?

The gungeon seems to get more bizarre and whiney by the day. :eyes:

Next time, should I PM you to tell you I'm about to use your name in a post? Really, tell me how you think this should work. :shrug:

Interesting comment, considering your whining about my "intrusion" into the conversation between shadowrider and yourself.

Is there some fantasy forum in your own head where we are having a different conversation?

also think, that "if guns were banned, the bad guys would still find ways to kill." To me, the bad guys will always get guns, banned or not... and if guns are not available they will still maim and kill with alternative devices. I think banning all guns will just create a horrific black market much as we have with drugs. Just my thoughts and I see it all as yet another huge gray area, no easy answer.

of course, the anti's won't understand this.

mark

and the point you make illustrates itself.

Do you think the fatality rate would be higher or lower?

Or are you saying that more dead children doesn't matter to you?

The FACT is, he used a cleaver in a gun-free utopia. Kids are dead. The method doesn't matter to a bad guy.

Please tell me then: who's been using your account to post all the what-if's and speculations?

Post #4: WE keep saying, if guns were banned, the bad guys would still find ways to kill.

Post #37: If guns are not available, bad guys will still find ways to kill.

Unless your objective is to sensationalize the numbers for your own ego driven agenda.

MORE dead children don't matter.

Tell that to the parent of the last kid that gets shot.

who fired it just like it is not your cars fault if you get all shithammered in drive into a school van and kill all the little children. Just like the knife is not to blame here. Maybe if he was using a wustof razor sharp 9 inch blade instead of a (insert whatever) more kids would be dead. Maybe a machete or chainsaw?

People are so stupid that this basic function of human existence fails them. People act, objects do not.

Why is it completely unacceptable to hand a loaded gun to an unsupervised child? Because we know that children do not have the level of responsibility necessary to be entrusted with a deadly weapon.

Every day, we see evidence that many ADULTS do not have the capacity to be trusted with a deadly weapon. Yet, your only response is the NRA "people kill people" bumper sticker.

At some point, the people manufacturing the guns and making them available to "people killing people" need to be held accountable -- just as you'd hold a parent accountable who let his child play with a loaded gun.

.. your child-ification of people, as though someone like you who "knows better" should sit in judgment of what abilities a person should have, preemptively.

Authoritarian, communitarian to the bone.

People don't automatically become trustworthy at a certain age. I'm all in favor of letting idiots fuck themselves up. I draw the line at handing them the ability to end many people's lives in one liberal-hating rage event.

A 2000+ lb piece of metal hurtling down the highway with 300,000 joules of force?

Oh, only the 'ability to end many people's lives' that you approve of.

Gotcha.

But, if you recall, these assholes are carrying signs saying "we came unarmed -- this time". They're not carrying signs saying "next time, I'ma drive myself."

Your continued blindness to the express purpose of guns is ridiculous. You buy a car to go places. You buy a handgun to shoot people.

Read Daniel Dennet's "The Intentional Stance." Humans have a drive to use things for their perceived purpose. No where is this better illustrated than with gun suicide statistics: states with high gun ownership not only have higher suicide rates, they have higher rates of attempts that strongly correlate with gun ownership.

People want to use their tools.

.. let's stick on point, though, shall we?

What other 'ability to end many people's lives' would you preemptively deny to people past the age of consent? How about gas cans and matches? Bleach and ammonia? Private aircraft?

Since you're talking about 'ability', that's a heck of a wide trough to plow through.


eta: And, just for the sake of curiosity, what other rights would you limit for teabaggers? You don't trust them to own a gun, you don't trust them to drive. Hell, you don't trust them with chopsticks.. Is there any other group that you'd like to strip the rights from?

Look at the restrictions placed on buying decongestants just because some hillbillies were using it for crystal meth.

By the way, you need to cut down on the weepy drama. No one's talking about stripping anyone's rights. I've never advocated for stripping rights. I'm talking about adding some reasonable restrictions on what we manufacture and sell in this country.

Glad to see you backing away from that one, it really does make you look silly.

So.. there were 37,000 deaths by motor vehicles. Why aren't you up for suing Honda, again?

Or tobacco at 420,000 (2004)? Or alcohol at 85,000 (2008)?




No, you're for perverting the judicial branch to accomplish what you can't get via the legislative branch. Why is that, ya think? Can't get it in through the front door, so scoot on around to the back?

Don't you get sick of having the same argument over and over again? Really, let's try something original for once.

I prefer the kindle because the battery lasts longer, and I can convert any text to the mobipocket format. Only downside? It doesn't do epub books yet, and I'm a proponent of open source.

It rocks. And it's running my code, so that's cool.

.. I can "say" that it's ours, but I never see it.

I have the kindle app for both the ipad and my ipod, as well as my PC.

Gonna get that now. :D

Sticking with ibooks for now.

NYT Editor's choice
WSJ
NPR
BBC News
Reuters News Pro
ABC Player
USA Today
Miami Magazine
AP News
Zinio
SCI FI Wire
IMDB


She still uses her kindle, since iBooks has fewer books, and fewer new books, but she often uses the ipad to read them.

Page turning is especially clunky.

:shrug:

One is too many. You tell them, you're the one counting.

The perp injured, fatally or not, all but two of the people in the building, so there weren't that many more people for him to hurt in the first place.

Moreover, given that 75-90% of gunshot wounds inflicted by handguns are not immediately life-threatening, it generally takes deliberate intent to kill someone even with a firearm. In the Stockton schoolyard shooting, despite using a semi-auto-only AK pattern rifle and firing over 100 rounds, Purdy wounded thirty people but "only" killed five; fewer than were killed in this attack in Shaanxi province.

In short, it seems that the primary restriction on the body count in a mass killing like this is how many people the attacker wants to kill before he feels he's killed "enough." It's fairly evident that if Wu Huanmin had wanted to kill more people, there would have been nothing to stop him other than running out of targets.

Not to say that you are silly but to make that statement in defense of the OP is silly.

Sometimes we make unfortunate comments defending some other comment.

So, is killing six million worse than killing eight? They're both bad but given Sophie's choice which would any of us choose to prevent?

I'm saying that with no guns, illegal, outlawed as they are in China, bad guys will still find a way to kill, directly contradicting anti-gunners beliefs that if guns were gone, there would be no crime and no murder. (Look through the threads, there are many, many examples of this).

would be "no crime and no murder". I have seen a lot that said "if this/then that" in response to some incident. Maybe right maybe wrong, not my call. Just trying to keep us all honest.

Now, how about that Sophie's choice? Six million vs 8? If numbers actually make one situation worse than the other the choice is easy. If not then what?

I'll not speculate about Sophie's choice as that was not part of the OP. If you'd like to start a thread asking that question, I'd be happy to respond.

In response to "Do you think the fatality rate would be higher or lower?" you said, "Doesn't matter, they'd be just as dead."

From this I can only surmise that you don't believe that numbers of dead don't matter. But is that true? I don't believe that you or anyone reading this actually believe that. I think a flippant, throw-away answer was offered to a question often asked in these discussions. That's okay, we (as in I) do that sort of thing from time to time but when called on it we're better off to admit it was a poor response and just cut our losses.

a secondary discussion not directly related. Post a thread if you wish me to respond.

I surrender to your artful aversion. I'll not start another thread to clutter up an already cluttered forum when a question asked, in this thread, here begs an answer.

So I guess in the great scheme of keeping score, you win. You get last shot as well. (Pardon the pun!)

You have your views and you're certainly welcome to them. I have mine. The two don't meet, no harm no foul.

The method is irrelevant.

Your implicit assumption is that the attacker will always want to kill as many people as possible. That assumption is not based on evidence, however.

It's fairly evident that the attacker in this instance could have killed everyone in the place if he'd wanted to, so we can only assume that the only reason he didn't is because he was satisfied (for want of a better word) with the carnage he'd caused. We see the same thing in many mass shootings. As I pointed out elsewhere, Patrick Purdy actually killed fewer people in Stockton in 1989 than the guy in this case, and there's no reason he couldn't have killed more if he'd wanted to. But he didn't.

So if, as appears to be the case, the primary limitation on the body count is the attacker reaching his own cut-off point, then the choice of weapon is mostly irrelevant.

Nuff said.

more young people still walking the earth.

Since I wouldn't want to put words in your mouth.

I'm making the case for a broad rule of thumb here. Human behavior has this annoying tendency to defy universal rules, and you can always find exceptions. The Virginia Tech massacre stands out precisely because the body count was unusually high, as did Woo Bum-Kon's rampage through Uiryeong County (Republic of Korea) in 1982 (56 dead not counting Woo, 35 wounded), and before that, the Tsuyama massacre in 1938 (29 dead not counting the killer, 3 wounded). The Tsuyama massacre, incidentally, was carried out using not only a firearm, but also a katana and an axe.

Be that as it may, examples abound of "mass" shooters restricting themselves to killing "only" a handful of people. The decision on the killer's part to use firearms does not ipso facto result in a higher death toll.