The Red Menace wrote:
They can have my poison and my strangling-wire when they pry them from my cold, dead hands!
Knives are covered under our weapon control laws here. You cannot purchase a knife (or craft knife blades etc) if you are under the age of 16.
The laws regarding the carrying of knives were also toughened a couple of years ago - if you are carry a knife or blade of any desciption (this includes razor blades) you must be able to demonstrate that you are doing so for a lawful reason, or you’ll be charged with an offence.
As with our gun control laws, these measures were not so much introduced to stop killing sprees by the psychiatrically disturbed, they were designed to prevent spur of the moment homicides occuring largely because a weapon was available in the heat of the moment.
Would knife laws have prevented the killings in Japan? No.
It seems to me that the more compelling question is why violence is increasing in Japan, rather than what weapons are being used - the determined can always find or fashion a weapon adequate for their purpose.
Timothy McVeigh killed hundreds of people with a bomb made from fertilizer and oil. These substances must be banned. They are more dangerous than guns. Furthermore, there’s no Constitutional Right to bear fertilizer.
Seriously, I agree with Needs2know:
Also, as a practical matter, people who are willing to resort to violence will usually obtain guns, even if they’re illegal.
“Hello, Orkin? Yeah, I have a nasty thuggee infestation. When can you come out to spray?”
Wheee…8 kids dead without a single bullet fired. I’ve been depressed with all the boring news lately, this incident sure cheered me up.
Ok, enough JET-style violence-mongering…think of this. What if one of the teachers had a gun under his/her desk? How long would it have taken to subdue the attacker, then?
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That seems like a pretty crummy law. Can I demonstrate to the officer that I carry the knife because I like to peel the skins of my apples or oranges? Are you sure this is the law where you live? Most places try to be specific as to what is a weapon and what isn’t.
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Except all the recent cases that are big news were not heat of the moment murders. Columbine and Jonesboro were well planned events not spur of the moment decisions.
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A waiting period didn’t prevent Columbine or Jonesboro.
I had read that violence in Japan was increasing. Particularly among young people. I don’t know why but then I don’t claim to be an expert on Japan.
Marc
{b}andros ** said
i read the thread again. I must be missing something. And bear in mind, I will NOT debate the 2nd amendment here. Pray tell, what are these things I should address?
Please tell me, is Needs2Know willing to stoop any lower at demonizing those who advocate gun ownership and the lower crime rates it breeds? 
(Two sides to every coin, Needs, two sides to every coin.)
Reprise…
It is interesting… clearly, wider proliferation of guns - or any weapon, for that matter - does not equate a significant increase in crime… rather, other economic and social roles play a factor.
I just did a quick search and found some information on Western Australia. I assume the rest of the country has relatively similar laws. From this website:
The current laws of the state of Western Australia regarding the carrying of knives is covered in the Police Act 1892, section 65, paragraph 4a:
**65. Miscellaneous offences **
*
Every person who shall commit any of the next following offences shall on summary conviction be liable to a fine not exceeding $500 or to imprisonment for any term not exceeding 6 calendar months
(4a) Every person who, without lawful excuse, carries or has on or about his person or in his possession any rifle, gun, pistol, sword, dagger, knife, sharpened chain, club, bludgeon or truncheon, or any other article made or adapted for use for causing injury to the person, or intended by him for such use by him. Every such weapon, instrument, and thing shall, on conviction of the offender, become forfeited to the Crown. *
Yep, that’s what I was thinking too, though I don’t think any amount of money is truly be able to protect anyone. In fact, it sometimes makes you a more conspicuous target.
I’m not certain that I share your sentiment that we’ve “lost ground” either; we have in some areas, but perhaps we’ve gained ground in others. The ideal society we strive for may be unreachable as a mirage, yet conceding should never be an acceptable option.
I apologize for straying off-topic…
There are a number of “knife control” laws on the books in the States. This link dates from 1996 so there’s probably a few more here and there, modifications, etc.
Personally I think they’re about as effective and sensible as the sexier debate topic of guns, which I’m pretty sure will take over this thread completely by the time it hits page two.
Sigh.
Anybody with the desire to kill will usually be able to do so. What we can do, through common-sense controls, is make it as difficult as possible to carry out an act of violence or at least limit the extent of damage.
Had a gun been used by the nut in Japan, maybe we’d be talking about an even greater death toll. Maybe not.
But such anecdotes do not negate the logic of reasonably limiting access to guns. Balance that how you will against whatever need or right there is for self-defense, but balance it, damn it.
And JET, if you think you’re being clever with your cyncial, morbid glee over the death of eight children, shut the hell up. It’s not funny. It’s not amusing. And I don’t care to hear you excuse it because you’re a tortued soul who is in therapy. You sick f—.
Thank you Scribe.
What has this society come to when we make a joke out of the deaths of 8 kids? No matter what side of the political coin you are on this is just WRONG. JET, I hope that you never have to experience the sensless death of your offspring.
Still sounds like a bad law to me. Not that I’m harping on you because it isn’t like we don’t have bad laws in the states. What constitutes a lawful excuse? I’d sure hate to bring my 2 1/2 inch pocket knife to Western Australia and get arrested in some town for it.
Marc
Hey, I make no excuses for who I am. Can I help it if a news story like this actually cheers me up after being angry and depressed all week?? And don’t kid yourself, there are thousands of others like me, who feed off of human suffering. Most of them will never admit it. I do. If nothing else, grant me that.
And one thing that gets me…how in CHRIST did a mentally ill janitor manage to slice up three dozen children with a knife, and nobody was able to stop him??? That’s a higher body count than most GUN slaughters in the U.S.!! Yeah, killing kids is easy, but there were ADULTS around at the time, weren’t there?? Unless this guy was some cracked-out, ex-commando bodybuilder, it couldn’t have taken more than 2 or 3 able-bodied adults to take him down. And I can’t imagine that Japanese teachers are culturally inclined to just stand there wringing their hands while some deranged lunatic makes sushi of their students before their eyes.
No, but you use it as an excuse to be disgusting. Get help.
That does not excuse you.
Thank heavens your reading skills appear to be non-existant, as that was discussed in the news reports already.
He started during a break in the classes. Also, there’s not that much violence, per se, in Japanese society so it’s fair to say the adults were in some shock when it happened.
He was drugged up. And three teachers finally subdued and held him.
Then you haven’t been to Japan. There’s very little violence there.
Your comments aren’t all that imaginative, either. You seem to think that this is all a scene from some warped version of Star Wars and this is just the “Dark Side” playing out.
The rest of my comments to JET can be found in the Pit at http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=73724.
Everybody supports arms control to some extent. Nobody thinks that private citizens should be able to own nuclear weapons (I hope!). Everybody opposes arms control to some extent. Nobody thinks that hammers should be banned because you can kill someone with one (I hope!).
The key is where you draw the line. Are shoulder-mounted rocket launchers okay? Machine guns? Automatic weapons? Handguns? Knives? The answer is to find a reasonable place between safety and rights. It’s incredible how much screaming and fighting goes on because somebody wants to draw the line at a different place than somebody else. Not that we shouldn’t debate such things, but the belief that a position which places the line slightly differently than you would is fundamentally and indefensibly wrong seems a bit absurd.
A couple years back, I went through a phase of reading quite a big of R. Buckminster Fuller’s writings, including the bulk of Synergetics, which has the interesting effect of using (or trying to) language so precisely it crosses the line into extremely dense. One of the thoughts there that stuck with me was a sort of philosophical riff he had when talking about subtle weaknesses of Euclidian plane geometry. A geometric figure is a bounded, and thus defined, area on an infinite, and thus undefined, plane. (By contrast, his own preferred geometry made no use of infinities whatsoever; no such thing as planes, merely arbitrarily large spheres or “spherical tetrahedra.” He thought in interesting ways.) Mathematically, infinities tend to mean meaninglessness. He riffed on that on the effects of “drawing the line” in philosophies, more or less as thus:
We get trained to think of position A (mine) on one side as being bounded, defined, and thus meaningful and correct–and position B (those different than mine) as in the unbounded, infinitely meaningless plane. There is thus no meeting possible, and shouting (or worse) occurs.
Thank you, Opus1. At last the voice of reason.
Who are these gun-control “nuts”? What is their “perverse agenda”? Is it not a total straw-man to imply that advocates of “gun control” want to ban all guns? Shouldn’t we see some statistics on how many people take this extreme position before we frame the debate in these terms?
Realistic discussions of regulatory possibilities focus on what is practical. There are all sorts of things that can be done to make it more difficult for criminals and minors to get ahold of guns, or to make it easier for police to catch them. It would not be practical to apply similar regulations to knives. That plus the above-stated fact that knives aren’t as dangerous as guns all in all, despite what the occasional isolated incident might seem to indicate.
sqweels it seems to me that the debate gets down to how one creates a cost-benefit analysis. On the one hand is freedom, on the other security (or human life). How we values each determines our stance on governmental control of many things, but for this debate, weapons.
This is why the utility of various weapons is weighed against their destructive potential in so many of these debates. The utility of a knife for many outweighs the number of deaths caused by murder with a knife. However few see the utility of a gun so the cost of gun ownership outweighs the deaths caused by those killing with guns.
For me, the number of gun deaths (approx. 13,000/year in the US last I checked) is a small price to pay for the freedom to own them. Clearly I think that knife laws as well as those on many other weapons, are costly infringements on our freedom to protect ourselves.
More imnprtantly, I despise the anecdotal evidence that spurred so many gun laws here in Colorado after the Columbine massacre. It would seem to me that the Japan killing is completely analagous and should the same logic be used as in the gun control movement, knives too should require background checks and a waiting period at the very least.