Personally, I don't think anything has done the 2nd amendment supporters a bigger favor than the UK police seizing and grinding up of knife blades to lower the UK's high number of stabbings. You can't really stack up a high body count with a knife, unless you are just insanely strong. And at that point wouldn't you have to make the streets safe by arresting anyone who is physically capable of overpowering someone? The whole thing wounds the legitimacy of the whole "we just want to ban guns because they kill large numbers in massacres" argument.
I'm a bit confused on the rules. Am I meant to wait for you, or whoever I'm paraphrasing, to respond and say I've gotten the gist or missed their point before making a counterpoint? If so, apologies.
It sounds like you're saying
these kind of approaches are a rejection of the idea that 'guns don't kill people, people kill people' and that it is ultimately incorrect that removing the means for violence will reduce the urge toward violence and therefore, violence itself. I'm not sure if you're suggesting the gun control advocates are more insincere or naive, though.
If that is the case, I would point out that in the UK these are two different issues. Stricter gun controls were introduced in response to the Dunblane school massacre, and so that was more closely related to the debate going on in the US at the moment. The knife-crime 'epidemic' is related to gang culture, not mass-killings. With the stabbings, the victims are rarely random in the way that mass-killings are. That's not to say the victims were not innocent or defenceless, but there are many relatively isolated incidents with a single victim so they're not the same phenomenon. The only similarity is that innocent people are dying violent deaths.
The Dunblane massacre involved guns and 17 people were killed, with 15 injured (plus the attacker killed himself). The London Bridge attacks involved no guns (except police) and there 8 deaths, 21 critically injured, and 27 injured (not including the 3 attackers who were shot dead). So, in terms of the body count, I agree that other maximally-lethal means will be used such as the vehicles used to run people down on London Bridge before the attackers got out and started stabbing people. Also, the motivation in a massacre like the London Bridge attack is to spread fear and the use of vehicles and knives is actually more effective for that. I lived 5 minutes from London Bridge at the time and know people who got caught up in that event. No gunshots meant people didn't know who or where the attackers were, which direction to run, or where was relatively safe to hide.
Now we have barriers along the entire length of the main bridges because they're the only places in central London you can build up enough speed to kill a lot of people in one go with a vehicle. We didn't ban vans or lorries, we built defences. We also had a spate of acid attacks in the UK, too. Arguably, this is because the penalty for carrying a knife is high but there is plausible deniability when carrying corrosive liquids that do horrific damage and is often fatal as well. The body count is not the most pressing issue because you'll end up with more cruel and unusual deaths. The Dunblane massacre was committed with two revolvers and a semi-automatic pistol and there were fewer total casualties than an attack committed with vehicles and knives.
