killing is easy
in reference to seung-hui cho and the recent viginia tech massacre, i see alot of pro-second ammendment nra people on message boards going on with that tired slogan - "guns don't kill people, people do", as if this makes it ok for our angry, mysanthropic, alienated populace to own firearms sans any sort of regulation.
"guns don't kill people, people do." well, yes and no. if i am standing 100, 50 even 10 feet away from someone and i point a gun at them and pull the trigger, i have had no physical contact with this person. the gun, or more precisely - the bullet that came out of the gun that's trigger was squeezed by my finger killed the person. the gun is what made this killing possible. the gun is the catalyst. i cannot kill someone with only my trigger finger without the aid of a gun. without it, i can't kill someone from so far away. well, maybe if i had a bow and arrow, but that's not practical as reloading after a miss allows time for my target's escape and renders myself vulnerable to attack from others.
an automatic(more accurately, semi-automatic) handgun such as the 9mm used in the killings contains a clip of ammunition. depending on the length of the firearm's clip/grip, it could hold 10 rounds or more. you can carry several clips containing all this ammunition on your person at any given time - the only limit being the amount you can physically carry: how many pockets you have, available room in backpack, bum knee, bad back, etc.
a handgun has a shorter effective range than a rifle due to the short barrel length. a short barrel means that the firearm is less accurate. that's why hunting/sniper rifles have such long barrels. let's give the handgun a 100 yard effective killing range before the bullet starts to lose velocity, i know that number is inaccurate(i haven't been to the shooting range in say, 20 years), but let's just give it this number for the sake of argument. the bullets that go into a handgun have more girth than rifle ammunition - the .223 caliber bullets that go in an m-16 are long and narrow and the bullets in a .45 caliber or 9mm are short and fat. they are made to punch holes in you at short distances as opposed to a rifle, which is a battlefield weapon that needs to shoot farther and through things, hence the keyword "field."
next, while not being a true "automatic", that is a machine gun, a semi-automatic can pop off rounds as fast as you can pull the trigger, with some legal forearms now having a 3 round "burst" option. i remember being at the shooting range with my father, who had just purchased his colt car-15 - semi-auto version of the special forces m-16. it's really bizarre. guns are like status symbols at the shooting range. you could see the lust in all those ted nugent wannabees' eyes as my dad pull that thing out. anyway, at some point my dad wanted to give it all he could, so he decimated the target by squeezing off all the rounds in his 30 round clip in like 10 seconds. remember that each bullet fired from a firearm equals a potential kill.
so let's add all this up - killing potential only limited by: how many rounds you have, how fast you can squeeze a trigger, and how many targets you have within a 100 yard range. if i had 200 rounds, 200 targets within 100 yards, i could kill at least 50 of them before they all started to run a way in a stampede. or, if they just stood there in a panic, i could kill all 200 of them easily in the 2 hours it takes for the police to show up if every shot was good enough. almost forgot, he had 2 pistols, so multiply the trigger squeezing factor by 2.
could i do the same amount of damage with a knife or even a sword? a sword has about a 6 foot range, if you take into account someone's reach and a knife has probably 3-4 foot range, also taking reach into mind. both have a much slower rate of attack than a gun. killing with a sword is not easy, you have to know what you are doing, where to strike. swinging a sword take alot of time and effort if it is to be effective. i used them in kung fu all the time. i hated them. if i'd tried to kill all 200 people with just a sword(or 2 swords to be fair), i'd be plum tuckered before i even got to the 5th person. someone would have easily been able to disarm me before i hurt a single human, or at least been able to fight back with a stick or pipe or something.
yeah, that's sick. i know. reality is not nice.
he probably would have killed someone with the level of rage that was within him without a firearm, but 32 people? no fucking way.
the purpose of a firearm is to kill. they have no other function. you can't use them to fix a vw bug or a sink or dig a hole, brush your teeth or wipe your ass. they kill with great ease and efficiency. you can kill people as easily as washing the dishes, channel surfing, or playing doom iii. we are a country of violence-obsessed, alienated psychotics. guns are freely available to anyone who wants them.
we will never stop this madness.
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