I am ashamed to admit I was not aware of this fact until today. I had missed out on a national tragedy. Over the weekend, in my home town of KC, Jovan Belcher killed his girlfriend and "baby mama" (oh, I hate that phrase) before killing himself. That night, Bob Costas talked about guns, which is aptly covered in a diary here. It wasn't until yesterday, though, that I realized that the real problem wasn't guns, my friends. The real problem, it seems, is knives.
Fox News laid it out.
Steak Knives, it seems, kills. What's worse: there are (at an estimate) 4.2 BILLION cutting knives in the US. Almost 10 cutlery knives to every person, counting restaurants, hunting knives, etc. Think about that. There are 4.2 BILLION - at a minimum, of these deadly killers floating around the country.
According to the NRA, there are less then 250M functional firearms in the US right now. So, I'm talking about a weapon that is 16 TIMES more common. Sixteen times more common.
Last year in the US, there were a few thousand self inflicted gunshot wounds, about 690+ accidental deaths.
Now, I want you to multiply that number by 16. Do it, right now.
How the hell did I miss out on this kind of crisis? With the sheer power to kill that knives have, it's amazing that we don't have racks of dead bodies stabbed to death. And I can't find statistics of self inflicted stabbings, but maybe it's just because they are hiding those statistics from us.
I mean, when there was a mass murder in a Colorado Movie theater, can you imagine the kind of damage he could have inflicted with such access to knives everywhere? What if they had knives?
The American Spectator is on the case.
http://spectator.org/...
Let's suppose Belcher didn't possess a gun. There are any number of ways one person can kill another be it with a knife, a blunt instrument or by poisoning. Neither Costas nor Whitlock can guarantee that Belcher would not have committed such a heinous act in the absence of a gun.
NFL Forums are filtered with tales of knife killings, knife fights.
http://gulfcoastgunforum.com/...
http://riehlworldview.com/...
So everyone is on the same page, from Fox on down.. and I have to say.. as a person who was stabbed once a few times in my life.. knife violence is real, but I wasn't at all aware of how absolutely out of control it is.
Did you know that death by knives are at almost 12% of total murders in the US (sure, Guns are at 69%, with the rest being poisoning/fire/etc. but it's second).
I really hadn't thought about it until the pictures kept showing up in my facebook feed.
I went into my kitchen a few minutes ago and did a quick count. I have almost 40 steak knives in my kitchen, not counting the Chicago Cutlery set we picked up a few years ago.
4.2 Billion knives. That's a minimum number people. A MINIMUM. The more my feeds go by today, the more I realize I am damn lucky to not have been in a knife fight already. Because, we know, people leap into knife fight with that assurance they will win at the same level they grab a gun and shoot someone. Hell, to think of it, I'm surprised I wasn't one of those self-inflicted knife deaths.
I may need to go crawl under my covers. Too scary out here.