Mass stabbings don't get the attention that mass shootings do. It doesn't matter how many people are hurt or killed; they just don't get the media riled up. That's why most of you were probably unaware that four people were killed in a mass stabbing in Washington state on Tuesday.
But they were.
Four people, plus the suspect, to be clear.
A man fatally stabbed four people before being shot dead by a sheriff's deputy outside a home northwest of Tacoma, Washington, on Tuesday morning, authorities said.
The Pierce County Sheriff's Office said in a news release that deputies initially responded to reports made at around 8:40 a.m. local time Tuesday that a 32-year-old man was violating a no-contact order. They obtained a copy of the order, learned it was not valid because it had not been served on the suspect, and headed to the scene to provide it to him.
"It was an order, but it just hadn't had that final step of being served yet, so the deputy's intent was to serve that order today," Officer Shelbie Boyd, a spokesperson for the Tacoma Police Department, told reporters near the scene.
While en route, additional reports came in that the man was stabbing people outside the home, the sheriff's office said. The first deputy arrived within about three minutes and shot the suspect, who was pronounced dead at the scene.
Three of the stabbing victims were pronounced dead at the scene and a fourth died while being taken to a hospital, the sheriff's office said.
The stabbings took place in a cul-de-sac on the Key Peninsula, located near Gig Harbor and about 30 miles southwest of Seattle.
No names were released, and Boyd told reporters that the relationship of the suspect to the victims was not immediately known. It was unclear if the four victims resided at the home, Boyd said. She could not confirm if any of the stabbings occurred inside the home itself.
This is beyond awful, to be sure, but I want to point out something here for those who might not be too quick on the uptake: He killed four people with a knife, not a gun.
Anti-gunners will typically try to claim it would have been worse if he'd had a gun, but since a lot of so-called mass shootings have fewer fatalities than this incident, I'm going to call BS on that one.
The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms issued a statement highlighting just how little gun control laws managed to keep anyone safe:
“All the gun control laws enacted over the past few years in Washington state did not prevent this horrible crime,” noted CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “Thank heavens an armed deputy arrived to put a stop to this rampage before even more people might have been injured. Once again, a good guy with a gun stopped a bad guy with an evil heart.”
Details are still emerging in the case, but it underscores the importance of being able to act in self-defense without even a moment’s notice, and having the right tool for the job, CCRKBA noted. However, in Washington, anti-gunners have been eroding the right to keep and bear arms, which is protected by both the state and federal constitutions. Instead, they have pushed through a 10-day waiting period to buy any kind of firearm, a so-called “enhanced background check,” and waiting to take effect next year, a permit-to-purchase scheme with an expensive training requirement, which will almost certainly be challenged in court.
“Evergreen State gun prohibitionists have been gaslighting the public for too long,” Gottlieb observed, “but what happened Tuesday morning should put an end to that nonsense. Guns are not the problem, violent people are. Whether they misuse a firearm, knife, crowbar, automobiles, or some other weapon, the actions of these evil people should never be used to justify restricting the rights of law-abiding citizens.
“The fact this rampage occurred is an outrage,” he concluded, “but it reinforces what we’ve been saying all along. Passing restrictive gun laws will not prevent violent crime, and thinking otherwise is fatally flawed. The suspect in this case didn’t use a gun, he used a knife, and now four people are dead. Today’s silence from the gun control crowd is deafening.”
Homicidal people are homicidal. People broken enough to try and kill that many people are too broken to suddenly have a change of heart because they didn't have a gun handy.
The sooner we recognize that the issue isn't the tool, but the tool using it, the sooner we can start putting an honest look into how we can prevent these kinds of things without treating everyone as if they're a homicidal maniac who can't be trusted with the totality of their constitutionally protected rights.
Guns aren't the issue. They never were.
The worst school massacre in American history used dynamite, for crying out loud. Many mass murders are committed not with guns, but with gasoline and matches. Everywhere you look, you can find evil people acting evil. Laws have never stopped them. They never will.
But guns even the playing field.
I'm sorry to see innocent people being killed. I'm even more sorry to see that it happened in a state that's been tripping over itself to strip people of their gun rights, which will then ignore this particular story because it doesn't advance the anti-gun narrative.
Because that's why these don't make national headlines. It's not about "if it bleeds, it leads" or anything like that.
It's the narrative and nothing else.
