The Difference Between Min Yingjun And Adam Lanza: A Knife And A Gun – OpEd

Two deranged men go on rampages in two schools and in one case there are no deaths and few serious injuries and in the other, twenty-seven people die.

When Min Yingjun went on the rampage at an elementary school in the Henan province village of Chengping on Friday morning, his attack would surely have been just as deadly as Adam Lanza’s killing spree in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., had Yingjun been carrying similar weapons. But however murderous someone’s intent, a knife simply can’t inflict as much harm as a gun.

In the wake of America’s latest mass killing, the media’s interest is inevitably focusing on the identity of the killer, but what might be a more meaningful profile would be on the weapons he used — weapons that as has already been reported, were legally purchased.

It wasn’t Lanza’s troubled childhood that killed twenty children; it was precision engineering performing exactly in accordance with its designs. The bullets flew through the air precisely in the direction they were being aimed and were just as deadly as their manufacturers intend them to be. Who wants to take the credit?

“We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics,” says President Obama. But having had four years to witness how this president operates, it’s easy to tell when he’s making a vacuous statement. He’s advocating collective action — doesn’t take the lead — and says it should be ‘meaningful’, a phrase loaded with limitless possibilities and zero commitments. His words were greeted with skepticism:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York spoke for many gun-control advocates, who have been frustrated and disappointed by Mr. Obama’s failure to embrace the issue, when he said he wanted to hear much more.

“Calling for ‘meaningful action’ is not enough. We need immediate action,” said Mr. Bloomberg, who is a leader of a group of mayors against illegal gun ownership.

“We have heard all the rhetoric before,” Mr. Bloomberg added. “What we have not seen is leadership — not from the White House and not from Congress. That must end today.”

The problem is, even the majority of the advocates of gun control are ducking the central issue: the idea that owning a gun deserves constitutional protection.

The right to bear arms sounds like a libertarian form of self expression. It’s like saying, I can’t exercise my birthright as an America unless I can own a gun; that an America which curtails this freedom will no longer be a land of the free.

But is this really why so many Americans own guns? On the contrary, American gun ownership is not an expression of freedom; it shows just how much fear permeates this society.

Americans own guns to protect themselves from other Americans and even at its circular extreme in order to protect their right to own guns.

But don’t children have an even more important right: to be able to go to school without getting shot?