And all sharp instruments, axes, mower blades, sharp sticks and any metal flats that can be sharpened. Actually, virtually everything having a linier edge may be banned.
But wait! Could it be? Surely not! It couldn't possibly be that knives don't kill people, people do--could it?
In Tennessee, or a number of other of the states, I can virtually guarantee that at least six of the passengers would have been packing heat, legally. If you are going to ride a bus, you would even be advised to be carrying, so it would realistically be more like half of the passengers armed legally. There would have been no "fleeing from the bus". This perpetrator would have been put down like a sick dog by one or more of the legally armed citizens. On the spot. Possibly all of them politely taking turns shooting the beast and being extra careful not to hit the poor victim or one another. You see, you have to undergo proper training and demonstrated proficiency before you can get a Permit to Pack.
Would the victim have been saved? We can't know for sure. We don't know it there was an exchange or the guy was awake when he was attacked. In many or the Sates, the victim would have been old enough to be packing, at 22 years old. Had he been, he would at least have had a chance to stop the guy himself. If not, the armed passengers, many of whom participate in weekly "real-life scenarios", during which they are trained by actually acting out every imaginable scenario--even bizarre ones like this ill-fated bus ride. I am sure of it; the dude would have been shot dead shortly after the first terrible howl from the victim. Statistically, a very high percentage of stabbing victims survive (oddly, not as many as survive gunshots). But you do not survive prolonged stabbings and beheadings.
The training often includes (at least the classes I teach do) how to be aware of what's happening around you and how to read sinister or deranged behavior and suspicious body language. Using this textbook information of offensive posture, I once stopped a knife assault on my person by one such nut-case, which was totally unprovoked outside a retail business, before it happened. I knew from the classic posture of impending attack that the guy was reaching for a concealed knife. With that tip-off, I took a Daddy-Step backward and produced my own weapon, a military style 1911 45 automatic just as the guy turned to me with blade in hand. I by rights should have shot him, but the point is that I didn't have to. He remained insolent (he even raised his shirt and said he'd been shot before, showing a tight group below his liver. I said, "I'm not that bad of a shot!" But within a few minutes we both left unscathed.
I would tell you of three, or is it four, other similar experiences, some occurring with my spouse in tow and endangered, but you would think I look for these events. I don't. But at the time circumstances required me to go to some "bad places", and in one cases, bad places came to me--in one of the most upscale, crime free towns in America--Germantown, Tennessee. I merely went where I had to, prepared and without fear. I'm not saying that I was not frightened by the incidents, but I did not have fear about going there--because I WAS prepared, trained, equipped, and ready.
So what's my point(s)? Several. I am mocking the backward logic of the absolutely proven incorrect idea that gun bans save people's lives. Sure the perpetrator could have had a gun too. Do you think he could have done anything more tragic than kill and behead a guy in front of a bus load of people, before being stopped by an armed citizen, if the attacker did have a gun? I doubt it.
Point two. As an authority on edged combat, I am telling you that a knife is more dangerous than is a gun. Edged weapons are everywhere. They are called weapons of opportunity, and I bet there are ten within easy reach of you right now, wherever you are. You CAN'T outlaw all dangerous weapons of opportunity. Impossible, even in the most tightly government-controlled societies. What you CAN ban, are weapons that would be effective against inevitably-corrupted governments, who according to history will ALWAYS follow the ban by genocide of some kind performed upon portions of its own population.
In the last century alone, over a half a billion people were murdered by their governments--after being disarmed. That's a fact. That, unfortunately is the inevitable outcome of unchecked power. From the beginning, the USA has allowed citizens to check the same kind of tyrannical powers exercised by the brutal monarchies from which they had fled in Europe. Do you think people have become NICER since then? Ask the guy's family. The poor young guy without a head.
And the final point--at least for now--is that there will always be a certain amount of evil that NO ONE, even under the best of circumstances, will be able to stop. If a person wants to wreak destruction upon people, there are just too many ways to do it: run them over with a car, poison them with household cleaners, set them on fire with virtually any accelerant, beat or stab them with a stick, hang them with a rope. Hit them with a rock, a bottle, or a tire iron.
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Let me cite a trivia note: The US Marines were temporarily defeated, and they never did entirely secure the Southern Islands of the Philippines--where a brilliant and deadly martial art, utilizing seashells and rattan sticks was practiced by the Islamic natives and had been for hundreds of years. It is called Kali, after one of the islands. The reason the then-imperialistic US government's marines became known as leathernecks is not because they were tough as leather. It is because they had to adopt a steel-reinforced five-inch thick leather collar to protect their necks from the sticks and seashell weapons used by the poor natives who didn't want to be emperialized by Americans (or Spaniards, or anyone else.) They wanted to be left free and alone. Even today those islands mostly are.
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And given such undeniable circumstances, I'd rather have my fate in the hands of ME and my good fellows, mostly sane, well-trained, and looking out for one another, and armed with guns. I don't want my fate left in the hands of unarmed, frightened, good fellow bus passengers who have no means to help me. Nor do I want my fate left in the hands of even one of the BEST LAW INFORMANT AGENCIES in the world The Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Not even Dudley Do-Right himself. What good are they when I am on a bus out in the wide-open plains, miles from nowhere? How long did it take the RCMP to get there? I know, but I want YOU to read it for yourself.
One good citizen trucker tried to subdue the guy. What did HE have to work with. A friggin tire iron or crowbar as I recollect the reports reading. Nice try but he and the two other brave souls ran out of the bus when the crazo turned toward them. The tool was helpful at least in securing the door.
Some of the anti-gunners may wake up. Most won't, unless they have a life-changing experience. Some KNOW the score but plan on it working in their favor as they eventually take the government from the people and give it to the state. A few decades ago, such governments were called communists. Today they are mostly failed, but not after terrible doings. Tell me my beloved Canadians (truly I feel that way)? Do you feel safer today?