You’ve probably heard about Wednesday’s stabbing at the Franklin Regional High School in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. Alex Hribal, a tenth grader at the school, allegedly brought two large kitchen knives to school and started stabbing students as they prepared for class that morning. The whole thing took only five minutes, but in that time 20 students and one adult were stabbed, some of them very badly. Thankfully, no one died, but two students remain in critical, but stable, condition.
My colleague Carl at Simply Left Behind makes the important point, Imagine If He Had a Gun. I’m not especially interested in the reasons why a young man would do such a thing. From time to time, people are going to do bad things. We can try to help such people, and we certainly don’t do a good enough job of that. But there will always be people who fall through the cracks and it is best that when they do, we limit the harm they can do.
When it comes to international affairs, we as a society are obsessed with the idea that Iran might get a nuclear weapon. The idea is that we can’t allow an unstable actor to have such potentially catastrophic power. I don’t actually think that reasoning applies to Iran more than any other country (Iran is stable and rational), but the basic reasoning is valid. “Loose nukes” are very bad indeed. But in the United States, “loose guns”—the nuclear weapons of the streets—seem not to be a big issue.
If Hribal had had a gun, people would have died—probably many, including Hribal himself. We don’t know much about the case, so we can’t say for such why he chose to use knives. My guess is that a gun was not easily available to him. And that’s as it should be. It amazes me that in many homes, the Wii is locked up but kids can get at guns any time they want. But this goes against the idea that if someone tries hard enough they can get a gun. While that is undoubtedly true, kids especially tend to be more impulsive, and if guns aren’t around, they’ll use something else. (Sometimes with tragic consequences.)
I understand the gun rights advocates arguments, and I’m not totally opposed to them. But as in all of my politics, I’m a pragmatist. Serious people keep their guns locked up in safes, and they treat unloaded guns as if they were loaded, and they always keep their finger off the trigger until they are ready to shoot, and on and on. But most people aren’t serious when it comes to this stuff. They take no more care for their guns than they do for their kitchen knives. And that is a major problem that gun rights advocates should spend more time on. (Note: there are a lot of gun safety nuts who shout this stuff all the time. But the NRA isn’t spending most of its money lobbying for more gun safety courses.)
It would be a much better nation if it were a whole lot easier for unstable people to grab a couple of knives and hit the streets than to grab a gun and a box of ammo. And that is to take nothing away from the suffering of Wednesday’s stabbing victims. But you know the old saying, “Better in a hospital bed then dead.” I wish them all a speedy and full recovery.
