A familiar horror reached Pooja Kanda first on social media: There had been a sword attack in London. And then Kanda, who was home alone at the time, saw a detail she dreaded and knew all too well.
A man with a sword had killed a 14-year-old boy who was walking to school. Two years ago, her 16-year-old son, Ronan, was killed by two sword-wielding schoolmates while walking to a neighbor’s to borrow a PlayStation controller.
“It took me back,” Kanda, who lives near Birmingham, said about Daniel Anjorin’s April 30 killing in an attack in London’s Hainault district that also wounded four people. “It’s painful to see that this has happened all over again.”
In parts of the world that ban or strictly regulate gun ownership, including Britain and much of the rest of Europe, knives and other types of blades are often the weapons of choice used in crimes. Many end up in the hands of children, as they can be cheap and easy to get.
You can both engage in immediate harm reduction while also working towards solutions to poverty and deprivation.
Providing for people’s needs will be the most effective way to reduce the violent crime rate… But it won’t go away entirely. Ever. Some people have their heads screwed on backwards. Some people have fringe religious ideologies that encourage violence. Some people are raging alcoholics even with money and security - they’ll commit domestic violence no matter how wealthy they are.
None of them should own guns.
When politicians are looking to score points with the public will they enact expensive social safety nets, or will they push for cheap and quick weapon bans?
Do politicians care about efficacy, or do they care about appearing to take action?
If a person’s goal is to reduce homicides the means need to be decoupled from the argument. It’s highly counterintuitive, but four decades of US domestic policy have proven that if the means of homicide are a part of the discussion politicians will focus on it in order to look like they’re doing something without spending enormous amounts of taxpayer money - efficacy be damned.
Approximately the same number of people die from gun homicides as homelessness in the USA.
I don’t want to solve either/or - I want to solve both.
And while deprivation is a common root they have other uncommon causes that need addressing. The gun craze of America needs to be clamped down on and regulated.
We have the ability to do both. Why would you argue against one?
Because the gun laws in place are about as far as things can go without repealing the second amendment. Further laws are either doomed to fail or make only marginal differences.
Those bills and proposals waste precious political capital that could otherwise be used passing laws that address the root causes of homicide.