A_C_E said:
Yes I know I went overboard with 'anywhere in Canada' statement but it holds true overall for America. Just because there are plenty of ways to killing people doesn't mean anything. Psychologically the human brain will look for the easiest way to do something and in this case guns are the easiest way to kill someone. Its all about means and if you take that convenience away from someone then psychologically it won't be worth it for them. The main reason someone would choose means over convenience would be if it were a targeted person that they were trying to kill. Adam Lanza didn't have a target (most mass shootings don't, if any at all) and what was the weapon used? A gun of course because its the easiest way to kill someone. If Lanza were to have hated someone and killed them there is the possibility of other means of killing them in which case you would have a point, but if your just going to point out that he could have just taken a car and crashed it into a school then light that school on fire...when the hell has this ever happened? And how many times? There are cars all over the streets in America and are stolen all the time. Everyone's got a friggin' lighter or match. So why didn't he just do it that way in the first place? Because his mother (a random person in America) had a gun. I've never heard of someone doing something like that. Not in places other than America where Gun Laws are more prominent. |
If you subtract the large cities in the United States, which have strict gun control laws then the crime rate isn't that much different: about 2.2 vs. 1.6.
He could have hit people with a car killing children as they left school, for example. This man did it by accident, imagine what he could do on purpose.
But since you're interested, there were 500,000 arsons in the period of 1987-1997 in the United States. 2.2% of those were at schools. That's 11,000 arsons at schools over 10 years, or a rate of 1,100 arsons at schools per year.
http://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/arson.pdf







