Gun control advocates can be very myopic. They view all crimes as different things, apparently, rather than part of any overall idea.
Hence them focusing exclusively on guns rather than, you know, crime.
Yet stabbings are a thing as well, and no one feels better their loved one was stabbed to death instead of being shot.
Take this recent case from New York City as an example.
A 28-year-old man was stabbed to death during a scuffle at a Brooklyn gas station — with the caught-on-video slaying now being probed as a possible anti-gay hate crime, sources said Sunday.
Surveillance video footage obtained by The Post captured the heated exchange between two groups that turned deadly around 11 p.m. Saturday at a Mobil station on Coney Island Avenue, according to cops.
The video shows four shirtless black and Hispanic men gassing up their car — two of them seen dancing in their swim trunks — when another group standing outside the convenience store starts jawing at them.
The encounter grew increasingly tense as the two groups came face-to-face and exchange words for several minutes.
The suspect is a Muslim man who claims he was offended by the “scantily clad men” dancing, which is why hate crime charges are being considered.
Yet that’s not what we really look at here. It’s a stupid motive, to be sure, and I could rail against it until I’m blue in the face, but we don’t deal with that here.
What I’m going to focus on is the weapon: A knife.
Now, as things currently stand, there’s little reason to believe we’d see extensive knife control in the US, at least not for a long time–those in favor of weapons control are very focused on guns right now, as previously noted–yet non-gun homicides like this are still a fairly sizeable number.
In fact, as we’ve written previously, our non-gun homicide rate in the US is higher than many other developed nations’ total homicide rate.
By focusing on shootings instead of murders in general, anti-gun activists are essentially pretending that stabbings like this aren’t relevant, that they’re not an issue.
Yet if we had zero gun homicides, we’d still have more murders than other developed nations. Pretty sure that stabbings would make up a large portion of those killings, too.
So what’s the answer?
Well, first, we need to stop trying to demonize the weapons rather than the killers. Trust me, when it’s someone you care about, you won’t feel better that they weren’t shot, so let’s not pretend there’s an appreciable, meaningful difference.
Instead, we should be focusing on why people kill.
In this case, the allegation is that this is an offended Muslim who didn’t want to see people he perceived as gay dancing while pumping gas. If that’s true, that’s something to address.
But enough with blaming the weapons. Stabbings, shootings, beatings, all of them are awful and shouldn’t be happening at all. It’s not the tool itself but the tool using it that’s the problem.