So in 24 hours we’ve gone from “mass shooting” to “guy kills co-worker; shooter killed and bystanders wounded by police”. :rolleyes:
If only the pedestrians had been carrying, this whole situation could’ve been avoided.
Certainly I am not arguing that a knife or a car or a rolled up newspaper is less lethal than a firearm. As to whether it is statistically less or more frequent for a person to succeed in killing a number of people without the benefit of a firearm, I do not know (but it would be interesting to research)
But I agree with Vinyl who basically indicated that this brings to him/her no sense of reassurance- honestly, if a dude with a knife can accomplish the same mayhem as a guy with a gun then it seems that banning weapons of all sorts will have negligible effect with saving folks from harm by the hands of a guy determined to take out as many people as he can for whatever twisted reason he might have.
Far from taking away from this any sense of reassurance, I realize that there are other human beings around there will always exist the potential of being murdered randomly and for no good reason, by gun, knife, hand, cheese grater, etc - or to save anyone from being killed by the friendly fire of police officers trying to take the cheese grater wielding atacker down.
No doubt. If the pedestrians had been carrying, they could have returned fire and taken out the…
Shot by cops, you say?
Nevermind.
LOL. Two trained cops managed to injure nine people. Now I have this scene in my head of a dozen bystanders all firing wildly and hitting an average of 5 innocents each. 60 shootings that is. Fun!
Sorry, I missed my window to edit my last paragraph which, upon re-reading was badly worded. I meant: “Far from taking away from this any sense of reassurance, I realize that as long as there are other human beings around there will always exist the potential of being murdered randomly and for no good reason, by gun, knife, hand, cheese grater, etc - and, most tragically, nothing can save usfrom being killed by the friendly fire of police officers trying to take the cheese grater wielding atacker down.”
Sorry, I missed my window to edit my last paragraph which, upon re-reading was badly worded. I meant: “Far from taking away from this any sense of reassurance, I realize that as long as there are other human beings around there will always exist the potential of being murdered randomly and for no good reason, by gun, knife, hand, cheese grater, etc - and, most tragically, nothing can save us from being killed by the friendly fire of police officers trying to take the cheese grater wielding atacker down.”
Then those innocents also fire back, and the whole thing cascades through Manhattan until it reaches the water.
All we need is a Neo to make all the bullets freeze and fall harmlessly to the ground.
Latest story is that all the bystanders shot, were shot by police http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/25/justice/new-york-empire-state-shooting/index.html
“When the British shoot, the Germans duck. When the Germans shoot, the British duck. When the Americans shoot, everybody ducks.”
*- WW2-era saying.
*