British media is reporting that at least seven students have been killed and between 12 and 19 more were wounded in a knife attack at a secondary school in Shaanxi Province in China, perhaps underscoring something said earlier in the week by the head of a national gun rights organization after the rental van rampage in Toronto.
“We need to focus the blame where it belongs, on the deranged, violent person who commits the violent act,” noted Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, a grassroots activist group based in Washington State.
Had this attack involved a firearm, there might be an immediate outcry for some new gun control effort in the U.S., even though the killings occurred halfway around the world.
According to the Express, the attack happened at 6:10 p.m. local time. The apparent motive may have involved taking some sort of revenge against the school, where the suspect once was a student.
Most of the victims were female students, the Express noted. The Daily Star said the victims ranged in age from 12 to 15.
Because private gun ownership is virtually unheard of in the communist nation, knife attacks are not a rare phenomenon. There have been other multiple-fatality knife attacks over the past few years.
Likewise, British newspapers have been lately lamenting the increase in knife-attacks and slayings just in London in recent months. The United Kingdom also has tough gun control laws, but they haven’t dulled the criminal misuse of bladed weapons.
Firearms regulations are stricter in Canada, as well. But that didn’t stop Monday’s multiple-fatality attack by a man driving a rented van.
In both cases, the weapons of choice would not require any kind of background check. Knives are pretty common in China, and what happened in Toronto is similar to what happened in New York City last year when a man driving a rented truck drove into a crowd on a bicycle path.
Not surprisingly, the suspects in those attacks were considered responsible, and nobody has campaigned or marched for restrictions on rental vehicles. In China, murderers are dealt with harshly.
In the United States, however, personal responsibility seems to take a back seat to gun control when a firearm is used in a crime, say gun rights advocates.
