Darrell Haskins



Like everybody else, I was sickened by last week’s shooting in Oregon that killed nine people and wounded several more. At a time like this, it’s easy to blame guns for what happened and call for drastic measures in hopes of preventing this kind of violence from occurring again. But the reality is that no law can prevent a determined individual from taking human lives. Even if we banned guns entirely, the reality is that someone’s just going to invent, manufacture, and use a high-powered knife launcher to commit mass murder.


We could take away everyone’s firearms tomorrow, but for any psychopath bent on causing death and destruction, killing a dozen people would still be no further away than designing a long-distance knife thrower, building it, calibrating it to accurately hit targets tens or hundreds of feet away, and ultimately going into a public area and inflicting significant casualties on unsuspecting civilians.



Sadly, it’s just that simple.



You remove guns from the equation, and knife-launching massacres will just replace the shootings. There’s no two ways around it.


That’s why it’s important not to respond to a tragedy like this by rushing to pass laws that fail to make anyone safer while at the same time infringing on everyone’s individual liberties. We should all take time to mourn the victims, but we have to understand that no regulation, no matter how well intended, can stop a person who’s determined to commit a similar act of gruesome violence, whether with the aid of a gun or an elaborately machined contraption capable of whipping scores of knives at high speeds, one after the other, into a crowd of people.



When people claim otherwise, I just have to shake my head. Seriously, what world are these anti-gun bleeding hearts living in?




The way you hear so many TV personalities and online commenters talk about it, you’d think that ending violence in the U.S. would be as simple as rounding up all the guns, or stringently regulating their sale from here on out. But think about how absurd that idea is. Does taking away guns make crazy, murderous people any less crazy or murderous? Does taking away guns prevent someone from getting their hands on a knife, then crafting a launching mechanism that propels the knife through the air with immense force, then buying a lot more knives to load into that mechanism, then pulling that device out unsuspectingly and spraying knives across a public area? Of course it doesn’t, and that’s why their argument is so foolish.



Imagine that we did enact sweeping gun control legislation immediately. Do you think the next would-be theater-shooter or mall-shooter or campus-shooter would throw up his hands and say “Oh, well”? Of course not. He’d simply draft plans for a portable device that can launch bladed weapons across a room or down a hallway, make sure it had sufficient power to send knives penetrating through closed doors and into people cowering on the other side, assemble this machine on his own time, and finally, carry it into a school, church, or place of business. Those are just the kind of deranged people who are out there.




You remove guns from the equation, and knife-launching massacres will just replace the shootings. There’s no two ways around it.



As long as there are criminals in the world who set their minds to causing bloodshed, they’re going to find a way to do it. And if you take away the nearest tool for the job, all they’ll do is think of, draw up, manufacture, test, redesign, retest, practice until they obtain a degree of proficiency, and employ a new means to take innocent lives. That’s just common sense, plain and simple.




The simple, tragic fact is that some people will die at the hands of the angry, the hateful, and the mentally unstable. And that won’t change whether the deaths are caused by bullets or by knives flying through the air at 1,500 miles per hour.



All that cracking down on gun ownership would accomplish is violating the constitutional rights of millions of Americans, while doing absolutely nothing to stop some sick, twisted person from murdering dozens with a rapid-fire dagger blaster six months from now, or in a year, or next week, or however long it takes them to devise such a device as well as a method of quickly and efficiently reloading dozens upon dozens of knives into the weapon’s launching chamber and then carrying out their horrific plans.




And don’t say we could just prevent that by banning knife launchers. A criminal could easily kill just as many people with a fully automatic baseball bat flinger.