Fw: “Ban the butcher knives” takes on NY Times on gun control

and here’s another reason knives should be banned-
Georgia: one 14, one 16 year old – girls stab and kill the 14 year olds grandparents to death.

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Jay Ambrose: Ban the butcher knives

By JAY AMBROSE, Scripps Howard News Service
August 20, 2004

“A man was fatally stabbed after he commented on another man’s
hairstyle in an apartment lobby, deputies said.” ? Pompano Beach, Fla.,
Associated Press, Aug. 15, 2004.

“A Highland Park man was sentenced to 35 years in prison Thursday for
the stabbing death of a woman last year.” ? Chicago Tribune, July 30,
2004.

“In a statement to police, the mother said she stabbed Kayla in the
chest with a foot-long butcher knife.” ? Buffalo News, July 20, 2004.

The above cases all involved butcher knives and represent just three of
many thousands of butcher-knife stabbings that have occurred in recent
years. I checked it out in an electronic library, and let me tell you,
some of the butcher-knife slayings you can read about there will make
your stomach churn.

Isn’t it about time, fellow Americans, that we outlawed the sale of
these wide-blade, sickeningly long means of mayhem, replacing them in
our kitchens with short, thin knives that could easily perform all the
necessary culinary functions?

A stupid argument? I confess that it is, but not much stupider than
the argument of a New York Times columnist arguing for an extension of
a national assault-weapon ban due to expire on Sept. 13. “The bottom
line,” he wrote, “is that Mr. Bush’s waffling on assault weapons will
mean more dead Americans.” Here, in one sentence, is just about
everything wrong with the arguments of gun-control enthusiasts, not to
mention a certain brand of morally superior leftists.

The bottom line, in fact, is that doing what this columnist wants
would almost certainly have exactly zero impact on gun deaths in this
country. I would agree that except for its being politically deceptive
and for getting in the way of people who employ the guns to blast away
safely at inanimate targets, the ban poses no particular harm. The guns
are not so useful as butcher knives. But neither is there any
particular advantage. The ban was a fraud to begin with.

Assault weapons, you might think, are automatic, blam-blam-blam,
machine-gun equivalents. Hold the trigger down and you can spray the
room with lead, missing nothing. Nope. Assault weapons are
semiautomatic. To fire the first shot, you have to pull the trigger. To
fire the second shot, you have to pull the trigger. And the same with
the third, fourth and on and on. In that respect, assault weapons are
no different from many other kinds of guns ? semiautomatic pistols,
many hunting rifles, many shotguns ? anymore than butcher knives are
much different in their killing potential from many other kinds of
knives.

What differentiates assault weapons from these other firearms is not
what they do, as a number of commentators have now pointed out. It is
how they look ? namely, very mean, just as a butcher knife may look
more frightening than the average steak knife. Even if extending the
ban would somehow totally eliminate all those already in existence ? it
wouldn’t do any such thing ? not much imagination would be required for
the criminals who use them to switch to something else that works as
well or better, as the vast majority of criminals already do.

The Times columnist ? Nicholas Kristof ? is particularly irksome and
self-righteous in his insistence that President Bush will be
responsible for killings if he does not press for an extension of the
ban. Not only would this measure keep nary a soul alive, but it is
somewhere between difficult and impossible to prove that any
gun-control measure ? there are hundreds in the land ? has ever helped
reduce crime. What’s effective are such things as putting criminals in
prisons for a long time and improving police-department performance.

In short, you must aim at stopping the criminal behavior, not taking
steps that mostly make people search out different means of
accomplishing their evil ends. To paraphrase a point that liberals love
to mock but that makes sense, it’s not butcher knives that kill people
? it’s those who wield the knives.

(Jay Ambrose is director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard
Newspapers and can be reached at [email protected] )