On a Tuesday morning a few weeks ago, a 20-year-old student named Dylan Quick showed up at his community college in Texas with an X-acto knife and went on a stabbing spree. By the time it was over—after the tip of Quick's blade broke off inside one of his victims—he had slashed 14 people .

In the next few days, the knife attacks at Lone Star College became a talking point on both sides of the debate over gun control. Libertarians used the carnage as evidence that a dedicated killer would go about his business with whatever instruments are at hand: Take away his guns, and he'll arm himself with cutlery. Those on other side used the same police reports to make the opposite point: Despite Quick's evil intentions, he hadn't actually killed anyone. Guns make murder more efficient, they argued.

In the U.S., firearms account for about two-thirds of all homicides; from a public-health perspective, they're more dangerous than any other kind of weapon. But there's something odd about the way that Dylan Quick’s knife assaults have been made into a footnote to gun violence. Stabbings may be less deadly than shootings overall, but they're hardly insignificant. In 2011, almost 1,700 people were murdered with knives, compared to just 700 with rifles, shotguns and explosives put together. (The vast majority of homicides are committed with a handgun.) Yet despite the substantial toll they take in human life, bladed weapons have been relegated to the margins of U.S. politics.

Sharp implements are now considered so benign that the Transportation Security Administration recently said that it would allow passengers to carry pocketknives onto airplanes for the first time since the security crackdown after 9/11. Knife manufacturers Victorinox Swiss Army and Leatherman were behind the proposed policy shift, and the pilots’ and flight attendants’ unions have been against it. But the prospect of knives on airplanes hasn’t provoked much outrage from the general public, even though the 9/11 attacks were carried out with blades. (The TSA had been planning to lift the knife ban on April 25th, but on April 23rd the agency announced that it would keep the ban in place while it solicited “further input.”)

How dangerous are knives, really? It depends on where you are. Mass stabbings are unusual in the U.S., but less so in other countries. On Dec. 14, the same day as the Newtown massacre, 22 elementary-school children in China were wounded by a deranged knifeman. Earlier school stabbing attacks in China have been more deadly. The March 2010 spree in Fujian Province, which kicked off a two-year spate of copycat crimes, resulted in 8 knife-related deaths. Japan has had similar tragedies. In the summer of 2001, a 37-year-old man stabbed 8 people to death and injured 15 at an elementary school in Osaka, and 7 more perished in a 2008 knife attack in the crowded Akihabara shopping district of Tokyo.