It’s not just the violence; the antis want your guns
April 15, 2010

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

The leaders of the anti-gun movement in America, and the tax-exempt foundations and billionaires who keep them in business, don’t seem interested in driving down the level of violence in America as much as they just want to prohibit civilian ownership of guns. Most of them make it plain, like giving themselves names like the current Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, or earlier National Coalition to Ban Handgun Violence.

Even the more coyly named Violence Policy Center isn’t really just against violence itself since it is fond of claiming that its not against all guns, just handguns and a few other guns, such as so-called assault weapons.

The media, too, seem to take a special interest in “gun violence,” playing up stories in which guns are used to commit robbery, murder and suicides, while ignoring other types of mayhem. Mass murders involving firearms get big and repeated play in the establishment print and electronic media, while other violence gets buried in the back pages—soon to be forgotten. There is also a special focus when the crimes happen in the US as part of the establishment media’s efforts to depict America as more violent than other countries and societies, many of which actually have higher violent crime rates than the US even after they banned civilian possession of firearms.

I was reminded of this the other day when I found a small, one-column, four-inch story about a mass murder attack on school children in China which involved a knife and not a gun. The story was buried in the back pages of the local fish-wrapper.

There was no comment from the anti-gun spokespersons that seek to gain relevance by attacking coffee sellers. Violence itself seems of little importance to them. After all, no guns were involved. Not only were the deaths of eight young school children and the severe wounding of five more apparently worthy of no special notice, but the pundits also ignored the story. If guns had been involved, the reaction would have been different.

They would have been acting like the heroines of the old westerns who would beat on the manly chest of the hero demanding to know “Must there always be violence” because guns were involved.

But in case you missed that story, let me recap it from various international media sources, along with a lot of other non-gun violence from China, a country whose criminal justice system has been admired by some top police administrators in the US, especially Chicago.

On March 23, a former doctor, armed with a knife attacked children at the beginning of the school day. He killed eight and severely wounded five of the primary school children.

The Chinese school was immediately shut down, but classes resumed the following day, according to Xinhua, China’s news agency.

Accompanied by their parents, students began to enter the Nanping Experimental Primary School at about 7 a.m. while teachers and 52 psychological therapists, including university students and psychologists from renowned hospitals, were welcoming them in all the 48 classrooms.

Some parents gathered at the entrance of the school, where the bloodshed occurred, to mourn the children’s deaths. More than 2,000 students and teachers of the school stood in silent tribute to extend condolences to those killed in the bloody tragedy.

“Please don’t be scared. We’ll always protect you,’ teachers told the students through loudspeakers, and then gave each student a warm hug, according to the Chinese news sources.

But that led me to wonder if the children would believe the teachers. After all, they are the same ones who failed to protect 13 of their classmates.

Given what occurred, protection and safety seemed a very limited thing.

China has witnessed a series of school attacks over the past several years, which are often blamed on personal grudges or people with psychiatric problems, leading to calls for improved security.

During the 2008 Summer Olympics in China, the father-in-law of a US Olympic coach was stabbed to death and his wife seriously injured by a lone knifeman at a Beijing tourist attraction.

Todd Bachman died during the attack in the center of the Chinese capital of Beijing as the Games got into full swing.

A Chinese tour guide with the couple was also stabbed but she was immediately reported to be “out of danger.”

After the attack in the 13th century Drum Tower, a popular tourist attraction, the killer jumped to his death from the historic site. He was identified as Tang Yongming, 47, from the eastern city of Hangzhou.

A month before the attack on the Bachmans, five Chinese policemen also were stabbed to death in Shanghai in July, 2008, after a man set fire to their station before charging in with a knife in a frenzied attack.

Government officials said the man, a 28-year-old from Beijing named only as Yang, was “quickly overpowered” and arrested. Police said he confessed he had wanted revenge after police arrested him the previous year on suspicion of stealing bicycles.

According to the official Chinese statement, the man set a fire outside the police station’s front gate at around 9:40 a.m. local time, attracting a security guard. He stabbed the guard and then charged into the station.

Violent crime is allegedly unusual in China, but British media claimed that the speed with which the attack was reported by Shanghai’s state media was also rare. Maybe violent crime may be unusual in China, but it is random and deadly just as it is around the globe.

The killings come after up to 30,000 people took to the streets in a county town in China’s southwest Guizhou province a few days earlier, protesting and rioting over a police investigation into the death of a teenage girl. Protesters claimed the girl had been raped and killed by a relative of a local official who had ordered the police to cover up the crime.

The knife attack in the police station mirrored a similar Asian rampage a month earlier in Tokyo, Japan, another country with almost total gun prohibition, when a man crashed a truck into shoppers before attacking them with a large knife, killing seven.

So that Chinese knife violence will not appear to be limited to disgruntled or mentally disturbed adults, I have to include mention of another violent knife attack that occurred two weeks before the school knife assault on the 13 children.

That’s when international media reported that a 17-year-old boy had a foot long rusty knife plunged through his brain after accusations of “wallhacking” in the “Counter Strike” video game at a Chinese Internet cafe.

The cafe, in Jilin province, is a popular hangout for youths who want to virtually blast away at each other in the first person shooter game. However, as anyone who has had the misfortune to play Counter Strike extensively will be aware, accusations of cheating are rife in the game even when they’re not happening.

In this case, one player couldn’t stand being repeatedly owned by the 17-year-old and took it upon himself to rush through lines of computers and attack the youth in the head with the knife. Somehow the kid moved just before the knife hit him and survived. Local doctors, according to media sources said that the knife missed major arteries and passed through parts of the brain that affected motor skills without somehow causing damage to them.

After a grueling ten hours in the operating theater, the knife had been completely removed, but the victim was still under observation “in case bits of rust flaked away inside his brain.”

All that violence in China without guns, but very little media attention in the USA and nary a word from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
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