Sydney Stabbing

With a tragic murder and hospitalization of random innocent people on the streets of Sydney today, you might think the media would be asking questions about how a patient of a mental health unit with extremist beliefs was able to escape the facility in which a court had ordered he be kept.

Instead of course, we have pathetic self-serving articles claiming how fantastic our gun laws were, despite an evidently suicidal and mentally disturbed individual being able to kill one person and severely injure another before eventually being detained by heroic bystanders on the street.

The danger these people put themselves in cannot be understated, it is readily apparent from the video that fortunately the attacker’s state of mind rendered him as a relatively ineffectual opponent. This could easily have been a fatal encounter for those bystanders too, had they been unlucky and faced a more determined and focused attacker. We won’t provide credit to killers and provide links to videos of attacks with bladed weapons, suffice to say going for a melee in a knife fight is a nearly surefire way to get stabbed in some way or another.

The interesting take away from this is of course the amount of time it took for police to respond, once again demonstrating that when seconds count the police are only five to thirty minutes away. Even if you are in the center of the busiest city in the country.

The comments that fantasize about how much worse it would have been had he had access to firearms are tiresome to the extreme. There is no need to imagine, we can look back at our recent history in Australia to see what happens in similar situations. See the mass shooting perpetrated by a criminal in Darwin earlier this year, the 2014 Martin place siege or even more lethally in Melbourne, using a car in Bourke street to rob six people of their lives whilst the country looked on in horror.

Our gun laws are effective in stopping people who do not wish to break the law from obtaining prohibited firearms, they do little else. When we see some of the most strictly controlled firearms in Australia in the form of pump-action shotguns and handguns showing up in the hands of these murderers it is clear the laws are ineffective in preventing their proliferation.

Patting yourself on the back because an escapee from a mental institution decided to stab and murder people with a kitchen knife in the CBD is insentive to those injured and killed and naïve beyond belief.

Instead imagine if we allowed people to possess less than lethal means of self defense; like pepper spray and electroshock weapons. Perhaps we wouldn’t even be talking about an incident that ended in a fatality at all.