An asshole pulled a knife at a school meeting to demonstrate that gun control was pointless, because he’d be able to murder the 17 year old girl in front of him.
“I’m considerably larger than you, OK?” the man tells the student in cell phone video recorded during the incident. “If something happened, if I decided to attack you, it would take the cops three to five minutes to come here — probably 10 if the traffic’s bad.”
The man, whose name was not released, apparently disagreed with 17-year-old senior Jade Pinkenberg, who spoke up during the school board meeting to argue against arming teachers.
“What are you going to do now?” the man says, as the teen backs away.
Jesus. You could also pick up a rock outside and kill someone with it. That’s not the point. These weapons enable a violent attitude, and give individuals to commit mass murder in minutes. That’s why we want these weapons removed from society.
Fortunately, the kids in the audience are smarter than Ol’ Knifey.
“I protested peacefully this morning and got suspended,” student Jo Herman tweeted. “A man threatened a kid with a knife at a PTA meeting and got gently escorted from the school. Show me the logic.”
So, by his own premises, someone was supposed to shoot him? I am trying to sort through all of the layers of stupid on display in that situation.
It would have been funny if someone had responded by pulling out a samurai sword abd saying “sometimes it takes a good guy with a sword to stop a stupid guy with a knife.” But that’s fantasyland. It’s like these guys have mistaken being in a movie for real life.
The news is that 17 year old seniors are speaking up against arming teachers.
Apparently Dylan Roof’s sister just got arrested for threatening black students and carrying a knife to school or something.
What. The. Actual. Fuck.
!
That is criminal harassment, at the very least! How the HELL was that man (I use the term loosely) not arrested?
I’m imagining him doing the same – or similar – thing, in a different context. Like, I don’t know, picking up a stapler in an airport, just as an example. He’d probably be dead within minutes.
Clearly the best defence students have against a man armed with a knife is to position sniper nests in the top corner of every room, at points commanding every corridor and in towers on the perimeter (it goes without saying that the highest points on every campus building should also be suitably outfitted). It would be prohibitively expensive to hire experienced people to man these positions all day long, even for schools in high property tax income areas, so obviously it’s better that students should be trained in how to shoot rifles and identify threats. The younger ones could perhaps give up an hour or two of class per week for training and in manning the safer positions covering lower-traffic arcs of fire. The seniors could more reasonably take on an hour of sniper duty each per day, enabling reliable defence of the school from the best vantage points (I expect advanced students could also qualify in the use of heavy machine guns and/or rocket launchers, for when the attackers naturally step up the threat level by driving heavy vehicles at great speed onto school grounds).
Come on, kids, you know it makes sense. Get with the program! Look out for yourselves, because you can be damn sure that the most politically-motivated sector of your fucking country isn’t going to look out for you.
Of all the nonsense and logic fails that surround gun control arguments my biggest peeve is when gun proponents conflate guns with lesser weapons and everyday objects such as cars, rocks, baseball bats, etc. They do this ALL the time. It’s like they don’t understand the huge world of difference between improvised weapons and actual, legit weapons.
It’s not even understanding; it’s very plainly not what they think is true but useful to say. Because knives are only ever as deadly as guns when it comes to slaughtering innocent people en masse. When it comes to defending yourself, hunting, even having fun with targets, suddenly knives do nothing and everyone needs to buy AR-15s.
If you can kill someone with a knife long before the cops arrive, why need a gun?
Apparently, amongst other things, she emitted a bigoted post hoping the protesting students would be shot, Charleston church gunman Dylann Roof’s sister in knife arrest:
The New York Times reports (some of?) the rest of the post as And that the local governor also seems deluded and vile (Dylann Roof’s Sister Arrested After Bringing Weapons to School Walkout):
Ask yourself, would it be easier to pepper spray and restrain someone with a gun, or someone with a knife?
It’s far easier, and much more common throughout the modern world, to not have on ones person pepper spray, a knife, a gun, or indeed any sort of weapon.
Chairs.
The answer is chairs.
When you have strict gun laws, and people start running amok with knives instead of guns, you can lob chairs at them to subdue them.
http://www.dw.com/en/deadly-knife-attack-in-hamburg-supermarket/a-39877740
(Not a perfect solution, there was still one dead, but still.)
Give the kids dildos and other sex toys. THAT’s the solution!
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/sex-shop-robbery-throwing-toys/
If knives are equivalent to guns, why do they need guns? Knives are much cheaper and you can also use them to chop onions.
@ Marcus Ranum, #1:
I have come up with a name for this phenomenon: “Pellicular Protagonistical Delusional Disorder” (PPDD) — the irrational belief that one is the hero in a motion picture.
When 16 children and their teacher were shot in Scotland in 1996, some pundit or politician (memory pulls the veil here) made an ass of himself arguing against gun control on the grounds that you could kill as many people with a tennis racket.
Happily his argument was treated with the contempt it deserved, gun control laws were passed, and the number of school shootings the UK has suffered in the following two decades has been precisely zero.
ardipithecus @13
That immediately reminded me of this Daily Show video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbJKhvmshGs
Warning: a brief clip of fictional violence happens. Also dildos. So many dildos.
(Also sorry! I looked and looked but couldn’t find any embed coding for the blog?)
blf @11
I don’t really think that we should necessarily fault someone if they carry pepper spray or a stun gun in the same way we do open carry assholes. I don’t think it’s all that uncommon for people to own one of these things either. At the very least they’re more suited to self-defense than guns are.
Beyond the pepper spray angle, I was posing a hypothetical question to the guy who pulled the knife if he would rather be confronted by someone with a knife, or a gun. Someone with a gun can inflict fatal injuries on people at high speed from very far away, but someone with a knife needs to get up close and attack someone more slowly. It’s easier to escape from or overpower the latter than it is the former.
Pretty obvious, eh? Kid backs away and is out of the immediate danger zone, unlike with a gun.
emergence
Sure not, and there’s been times I carried pepper spray at the insistence of my mother. While absolutely not being in the same ballpark as guns, pepper spray has one thing in common with guns: mostly useless for self-defence and very prone to accidents.
While I much prefer regular news about “21 people hurt in pepper spray incidence with 3 needing to be taken to hospital for severe eye irritation” to “21 one people shot with 3 being killed” it is true that people regularly either accidentally discharge that shit or maliciously do so.
Which is again an argument that guns really are the problem.
emergence@18:
I don’t know about you, but I’m fairly consistent in my policy of carrying my asshole discretely concealed. At least, in public.
“I’m going to run away from you, you moron.”
@eleanor – that politician/pundit was actually Prince Philip.
“If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean are you going to ban cricket bats?”
I’m late to this comment thread — but isn’t anyone as actively creeped out by this as I am? This is the kind of comment that you get fairly frequently as a young woman; there’s a whole population of bottom feeders who get off on the idea of physically harming, threatening or murdering girls. This was a threat, not a political point, and should have been treated as such.
jrochest #24
There are only 23 comments above yours.
Did you not read any of them?
@mod prime – yes of course, the old buzzard was Prince P. and it was a cricket bat, hence I failed at googling it. Thanks.
Um, yeah, to all the NRA Russia Trump Bots who go on and on about guns and knives…..emmmm…..thennnnnnnnnnnnnnn….
…..why aren’t your home armories stocked with katana and shuriken and switchblades and cyanide???