> It takes a lot more to stab someone than it does to wiggle a trigger finger and point.

Yeah, I'm sure your vast combat experience gave you this informed opinion.

All things being equal, a gunshot from most calibers suitable for self defense is going to be more deadly than a knife wound almost always. That said, when it comes to people doing harm to one another, things are never equal. I've seen stories, recent stories, of people killing more people with a knife than another person was able to with a rifle.

But that's just arguing tactics. It also invites the question of how firearms are used in self defense, which I don't think is an insignificant factor.

> Your argument is the defensive, overly-simple one, I hear everywhere.

No, my sarcastic statement is one part of a much larger discussion expressed in the spirit of the comment to which I was responding. Or put another way, you don't know what my argument is.

> An SUV driven by a madman isn't going to drive through classrooms full of kids.

The worst mass shooting in the US killed 60 people and wounded many times that. In Nice, France a guy killed 80 people with a truck. The worst school shooting in the US left 32 people dead. The worst school massacre in the US was carried out with explosives and killed 34, iirc.

You're arguing tactics, not absolutes.

> A knife can't sweep over a crowd of thousands from a hotel window and kill 60 people.

And of course the millionaire with his own plane could not concievably have done anything another way. If he just had knives, he'd have pitched them from the same window. Or not.

> But they're one of our biggest problems.

And again, I disagree with you. If anything, it's a symptom of the problem not the problem itself.

>A gun can't do much of anything useful other than harm other living things and people.

Yes. It's a purpose built weapon. However, sometimes that is called for. Because you can't change a tire with one does not mean that it is useless, just rarely needed.

> Wait, is your argument really "Compare us to poor countries and failed states so we look good?"

No. It's that if you're saying "this doesn't happen anywhere else" you need to put an asterisk behind that because it requires some qualification.

> Why would we not be compared to our economic and political peers which do not have these problems?

We should be. We aren't, however, those countries + guns. There are many differences and I think some of them are just as if not more significant to our rates of violence than firearms.

> I like how you started this by framing that the countries that don't agree with your assertion don't count because you don't want them to.

My assertions so far are:

• People use things other than guns to kill each other
• Guns are inanimate objects not demons.

Neither of those is untrue and neither of those vary from country to country.

My point is that when you look at countries over time, their homicide rate and their gun laws don't always track like you'd expect. It has nothing to do with what I want or don't want.

My other assertion, delivered passive-aggressively I know, is that the problem of violence in the United States is complicated and does not hinge on any one factor, including means. Even if we limit it to that, there is a whole lot of nuance and footnotes that have to be added.

I know nothing about his incident than people were hurt, a gun or guns was used to do the damage, and it happened at a funeral. I don't know why it happened, if someone was targeted, if it is related to any other issue like crime or domestic abuse, if the guns were acquired legally, recently or anything else. I do, however, know that all of those could affect the "how do we stop things like this from happening in the future" equation.

Tell me what you think we should do and then how do you think we should implement that on a practical level, please. What do you think is the likely outcome?

> You don't see the same volume of attacks but just with other things in places that aren't flooded with guns.

You don't look outside of high GDP countries, then.

You also don't look at the countries you're thinking of prior to the gun controls you'd like us to emulate; you'll find they didn't have our levels of violence then, either.

> The ready availability of ideal tools for this shit is a core of the problem.

No, it isn't. Guns don't provide motive. A killer absent a gun is still a killer that just has to change tactics. A person who's not a killer with a gun is no danger to anyone provided the minimum of awareness and caution.

>Hell, the variance in gun violence just between states with tighter and looser gun control shows a hard difference.

And, as we know, all states are identical in all other ways except gun laws, just like other countries are just the US with fewer Glocks.

> It’s like there’s a thing we have too many of that keeps causing all of these problems.

Right. Because surely no one would ever commit violence with something else. And the people who carried this out were innocent as lambs until the mean old guns whispered demonic influence into their virgin ears, making them go out and commit heinous acts.

Or, just maybe, it's more complicated than that.

Bird denier.

Who got the daily Bingo?

Zombie Pigeons.

Who's got Bingo?