PA. School Stabbing did Major Damage to NRA Credibility

Gun violence & stabbings are not the same

One of the 24 victims of the Pennsylvania stabbing attack at Franklin Regional High School in Murrysville remains in very critical condition.  The others have been treated and released or are expected to make full recoveries from the stabbing rampage orchestrated by sixteen year old Alex Hribal.  One of the teen heroes of this nightmare, who pulled the fire alarm while himself being stabbed in order to get the other kids out of the building, even took a selfie of himself at the hospital.

So, what does any of this have to do with the National Rifle Association.  Members of the NRA have flooded the Internet with snarky remarks about when is President Obama going to regulate or confiscate kitchen knives.  But the damage has been done. This stabbing attack taught the public the remainder of a lesson they had only learned fifty percent of at the time of the Sandy Hook massacre of elementary school children.  And that lesson is this.  In any population of human beings there will always be someone who is sufficiently unstable mentally, drugged, or ideologically  motivated to engage in a mass killing.  The number of coffins sold and families who will be left inconsolable is a function of the availability of guns in that society.

In countries where sanity rules, a kid goes berserk and stabs as many others as he can find, usually killing no one.  But America prides itself in its exceptionalism.  When our kids go on a maniacal rampage, they aim fully loaded AR-15s grabbed from under the bed and murder dozens.

It is sometimes difficult to argue in the abstract.  But the difference between a teen with a bandage on his wrist taking a selfie and a mile-long funeral procession of elementary kid coffins is hard to miss.