Hello, lovely readers. Some of you know me but others may not — I am a frequent reader but only sometimes commenter. I’ve become friends with Sarah over the years through our mutual connections in the SFF community, and I can even credit her for a major role in the chain of events that led me to meeting my husband. But that’s a longer story, for another time.
Today’s topic addresses a pet peeve, which is how every single time some human-shaped monster attacks a school in America, the resulting commentary heavily features the line: “This never happens anywhere else!!” Really? Nowhere else? In no other country, in the entire world.
To be clear, I know what they’re really doing is limiting it only to shootings when for all practical reasons, what matters is if someone died, not what kind of weapon did it. The next line in the argument is usually something about how okay okay, there are other ways to murder, but guns make for larger victim counts. When it happens in other countries, there are only one or two victims.
Well then. I have a story for you.
Setting this up requires a bit of autobiography. I lived in China for the latter part of my childhood, which consisted of the years 2008-2013. (I do apologize for any gray hairs that spontaneously generated among the audience just now.) My parents worked as teachers at an English-language international school, set up by and for the expatriate community, which in our area consisted mainly of foreign business executives and their families. As a benefit to their employment, my siblings and I attended the same school. However, Chinese law left us limited in our ability to interact with locals in a meaningful way, and that had a deep effect on our experience. Even in the years before Dictator Xi took over (he came into power less than a year before I left) Chinese citizens were restricted, and sometimes outright prohibited, from being involved in our schools, churches, and other social environments. Most of the time they surveilled us in a hands-off way that you could get by without noticing if you didn’t pay close attention, but it was always there. I’m told that in the decade since I’ve left, it’s gotten far worse, and I believe it. Chinese leadership is increasingly Maoist and with the prevalence of inexpensive security cameras and digital tracking technology, Big Brother is more possible than ever.
But that’s getting into the weeds a bit. I can continue ranting about China and the Damned Commies all day if you let me. Instead, our question: “This never happens outside of America,” right?
Hearing that recently, I had another flashback to my time in China. Our school had fairly robust security already — walls around the entire campus, and gates with full-time guards. At one point, the guards started watching much more closely when we came and went. They checked IDs, and sometimes inspected bags or other items being carried in. I was a teenager and paid enough attention to what the adults were saying. A series of knife attacks had taken place at schools around the country. Everyone in China was terrified. Fortunately I never saw an attack take place, but I absolutely recall the atmosphere of fear that resulted.
For many years, this memory felt like a fever dream. I’d never heard anyone talk about it outside of those of us who were there for it, and was sure that I’d never be able to find any articles or proof that it actually happened. Fortunately for me, some of my friends are much better at digging up old news articles than I am! Even more surprisingly, some mainstream Western publications put out articles, though I am sure they were buried enough that most people missed them unless they knew exactly where to look. Usually when I’ve mentioned this story, I get people doubting that it’s real, so I really have to conclude that it was barely reported overseas.
One from the Atlantic, “Why the Rash of Attacks on School Children in China?” from April 2010. This would have been my second year abroad, which fits perfectly in my memory. The article describes three incidents. Fifteen wounded, knife attack. 28 wounded, 4 dead, knife attack. Five dead, killed with a hammer. All victims were children. All perpetrators were adult men from elsewhere in the local community. Another article from the BBC in 2023 (describing yet another attack on a school) states that a total of 17 children died in Chinese school massacres during 2010.
Going through our search results, we see other school attacks in places like France and South Korea and Japan, all countries with stricter gun laws than America, if not as strict as China. Knives are most common, but some incidents used blunt weapons, bombs, acid, or incendiary devices. All of these are problems and in my mind, equally awful. Why does it matter if your loved one was killed with a gun, a knife, or a bomb? Dead is dead.
But here’s the linguistic game they play. Any time an incident involves a gun, it’s no longer a massacre. It’s a shooting. I insist on pushing back with that one. Of course they can say “it never happens elsewhere” if they make sure that it exclusively refers to only one specific type of massacre.
As for the argument that it makes the killing easier, therefore there will be more killings — that presumes some population of people who are a hair’s trigger away from killing everyone they see, but only stopped by the fact that they don’t have an “easy” way to do it. No, I argue that the important part is the line between “peace” and “killing”, and that once someone crosses that line, the weapon matters little.
Don’t believe me? Why did Ted Kaczynski mail homemade bombs from a rundown cabin near Lincoln, Montana, when he also owned guns? Why did Darrell Brooks kill six people and injure 62 by driving a car into the 2021 Waukesha, Wisconsin, Christmas parade? He was legally barred from owning a firearm due to past felonies, but that didn’t stop him from shooting a family member the year prior. He could have gotten guns if he wanted to. He really just wanted to hurt people and didn’t care how.
Heck, just this past week I’ve seen people argue that Charlie Kirk could have been saved by gun control. But go back only a few years, and Shinzo Abe was killed in Japan with a homemade shotgun. Go back much further, and Margaret Thatcher was dodging car bombs. It’s always something. Evil finds a way.
We have a violence problem in the world right now, absolutely. If you ask me, I’d say we need more religion and less paranoia. Better family connections. Less doomscrolling on the internet and more fresh air. I spend a lot of my free time watching true crime content, especially from a criminal psychology perspective, and I’m convinced that a lot of our societal issues come from people who are rootless and directionless and who have been convinced by the doom-and-gloom peddlers that nothing they can do will improve their situation, so now they just want to hurt as many people as possible before they go.
That said, some violence will always exist. Human beings are NOT SANE as a general rule and sometimes insanity leads to serious problems. Being a god-fearing woman, I turn to prayer and hope that things will work out, Lord willing, here or hereafter. If you don’t have your own source of faith, I implore you to find some philosophy that helps you stay grounded. When we talk ourselves down into that depressive spiral, that’s when we get closer to justifying evil behaviors.
As for the issue of safety, do what you can to make reasonable decisions, then take care of yourself and your family. Find a community that supports you and be good to them! And try not to lose your head, literally or figuratively.
Sources:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/evan-osnos/why-are-chinese-schools-under-attack
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-66151247
https://time.com/archive/6949952/chinas-alarming-spate-of-school-knifings/
Note from Holly: Emma blogs at https://sverizona.substack.com/ about things that catch her interest, often including historical clothing, fabrics, and domestic economy. You should go read her blog!
According To Hoyt 
And of course, there’s the whingeing ‘guns won’t make us safer’.
We’ve tried that with schools for the last 50 years. We know how that (fails to) work. Isn’t it time to try something different?
Clearly a lot of details implementation …
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If Leftroids could learn from failure, they wouldn’t still be pushing communism. ☹️
But they can’t. They can’t even admit the blatantly obvious failures of their policies. The worse they fail, the harder they insist “This time for sure!” Being wrong EVERY F*KING TIME makes no impression on them.
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When Leftists learn, they cease to be Left.
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Religious fanatics. They have become what many of them scorn and mock.
Erick Erickson was pointing out the “No Kings,” protest material reads a lot like church start-up materials. And they have suggested chants and hymns. Which are just as bad as you’d expect. He was on a roll.
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Sarah and others have been pointing out that Marxism is as much a Christian heresy as economic system for a while.
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Functionally, Marxism is closer to whatever religion was practiced by the Aztecs than to anything Christian, heretical or otherwide. It also shares characteristics with Islam.
Both IMHO, of course.
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Honestly, one of the reasons I don’t engage in the debate over whether or not guns are the optimal mass killing system is because I know they absolutely are not, and I really don’t want to give people ideas.
The reality of mass shootings is in the majority of that type of mass shooting, if the shooter almost always stops the moment they are confronted by someone with a gun. And if the good guy with a gun is there when the bad guy opens up, the average casualty count is less than two. So it immediately gets excluded from being a mass shooting.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. This is the third type.
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I only lived in China for one year (from summer of 1999 to the summer of 2000), in Changsha (Hunan). I was there officially to teach English, but there were a couple of unofficial Reasons for me to be there, as well. During my time there, not only was I beaten up in Tiananmen Square, but also on a bus in Nanjing–both times by Chinese men who didn’t like uppity foreign women being in their country, evidently.
But there was also at least one fatal stabbing of an American preacher while I was in China. My wai ban made a HUGE deal of talking to me, out of the six foreign teachers at our school, about the incident. I couldn’t help feeling that I was being warned about my off-hours activities. Not that it made any difference. We would occasionally hear people talking about this incident or that, but of course there was nothing in the Chinese media.
I totally agree that it’s a moral/spiritual issue, not a gun issue.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
The Above is about a mass killing in the US in 1927 without the use of guns. ☹️
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I remember reading about the China school massacres at the time. But being an former Intel-puke I tend to skim through more and different sources (especially for international news) than the average American.
And people tend to forget (or were never taught) that the first school massacre in the US (at least the first not involving the Indian wars) was the bombing of a school in Bath Michigan in 1927. 38 children, 6 adults and 50+ inured.
Perhaps part of the emphasis on school shootings (aside from the obvious attempts to undermine a Constitutional right) is that the numbers of that incident tend to overshadow more recent events.
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The China Show on YouTube covers a lot of these so-called revenge attacks by Chinese men who have decided the only way to protest is to murder innocents. Terrifying, since they are starting to happen in the US and the UK.
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The BBC occasionally had stories about the attacks in China and elsewhere. Usually knives, but not always, and schools are popular targets. (Although one guy in China attacked people on a walking/jogging track.) The stories generally vanish after a day.
I suspect the societal push toward isolation has a lot to do with the “venting” attacks. The publicity school killers and others get in the western media probably also plays a role. I dearly wish we’d do like one of the sheriffs and others have suggested and say, “A slimer murdered [number] innocents at a school/theater/mall in [place]. The scumbag is dead and answering to a higher Judge. Police are investigating,” and then move on. Deny the person any glory or recognition, and the likelihood of media-inspired copycats should decrease markedly.
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Spree killers are obviously pretty seriously related to what other cultures have had at times labeled running amok.
Running amok happens with the sorts of agricultural blades and household knives that are pretty necessary possessions at certain tech levels.
US spree shootings are obviously somewhat sociological. Nobody putting a healthy effort into raising a kid results in it all happening at government bureaucracy hands, which would do a bad job even if the bureaucracy wasn’t being actively malicious.
News media are also a contributing factor, and plainly tied into the same sort of murderously evil communist ideologies.
The trans push has a lot of indicators of being intended to create revolutionary murderers, but even if nothing else was clearly unwise, because it would have grabbed some of the people on spree killing track mental issues path, and direct them to communist trans activism, which would /not/ suddenly make them happier and healthier.
Even in absence of the trans push, we would have elevated spree shooters because of all of the critical theory trained school instructors, who tell whites and blacks, girls and boys, that they are bad and incapable. The preferred demographics are not having less harm the the unpreferred demographics, and some of that damage happens to teens who choose evil to fill what they do not have inside.
Re: tools
One, guns are not the most optimal combination of tools for maximizing victims.
Two, in the broader picture, guns minimize murders.
re: mindsets
Three sorts of mentally pathological murderers. Serial killers, spree killers, and mass murderers. Spree killers cook a while, immersed in research and fantasy over the plan for the killing. Mass murder is basically very related to academic theory, and to caring about abstractions of academic theory. Wanting to kill some group of people of around 10k on the other side of the world, in batches, is maybe often only going to make sense in some sort of big picture view. Which connects to secondary and tertiary school training in communist models of the big picture.
re: amok and conflation
so the phillipines had amok and juramendo.
Amok was seen in all of the cultures.
juramendo (derived from spanish) is specially oathsworn terrorist muslims. There were specific rituals and practices, and basically they were all terrorists motivated by a specific religious terrorist ideology. (Other flavors of muslim did not have this particular combination.)
Some US spree shooters are clearly amok, but perhaps we also have analogs to sworn terrorists in ‘school shooters’ and spree shooters.
US academic culture is sick, but almost certainly it is not uniquely sick among the subcultures of academics within the world cultures.
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I’m unpopular! Back to moderation!
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Ugh, I’ll holler at Sunny.
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Some of the conservative news coverage has had me going ‘not all gay furries’ in reflex.
The LGBT push in mental health approaches did not have the information to specifically recruit the disturbed people proceeding along an emotional path that could lead to carrying out a spree shooting.
It was not necessarily a matter of anyone going “let’s recruit the spree shooter kids”.
Going ‘any sort of unusual mental state is trans’ is very wide ranging, quite likely to have a huge false positive rate, and likely to have some unfortunate consequences. If you accidently sweep up 70% of spree shooter path individuals, plus ten times or a hundred times that many who are not unstable and violently inclined, the statistics of that grouping would still be expected to test as unusual.
Spree shooters are rare.
The genuine examples of trans and not some other issue were rare.
Obviously, the estimation and statistics for this particular unusual correlation extend beyond my knowledge, and what I do know is really more than I feel able to succinctly summarize now.
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Bob, don’t forget that most of the ones we’ve seen were female to male trans. There’s a reason for the term “roid rage”, and they’re being dosed with as much or more than a body builder.
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Yuup.
I’ve basically been considering my investigations into each individual trans shooting too superficial to sort out male to female, female to male, or information warfare/noise. I definitely do not know myself about the statistics of that.
I would take your word for it, barring conflicting statements, because it makes sense and because I don’t feel that certainty on the point makes a policy difference to me.
A woman with some of the statistical women interest in ‘safety’ and social group markers combined with not being used to the T might have a stronger tendency to break that way.
Toxic women often form grudges against other women for having ‘better’ children, and also have a tendency to poison the children. Chemically induced confidence in more direct methods might well translate into a spree shooting instead of a poisoning.
Beyond that, would be inconsistencies in the provided supply of the hormone.
Chemicals that hit the brain can have destabilizing effects with an unexpected drop in dose.
Some of the pathways that give you a supply of a hormone, also give you other stuff, which can be poisonous and also have other effects on the brain.
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After the mass murder in Tasmania, Australia heavily restricted private ownership of weapons to stop mass murders and confiscated most private firearms. I got curious, so I did a bit of searching.
I compared the 30 years before the Tasmanian attack to the 30 years after it. There weren’t a lot of mass killings in either period – Australia was a pretty peaceful country during that 60-year period. However, there were almost exactly as many mass killings after the gun confiscation as there were before it (sorry, it was a few years ago that I did this so I don’t remember the exact numbers). I think afterwards fell short of before by just a few deaths.
What changed was that before the confiscation the mass murders were split pretty evenly between firearms and arson, with one or two knife attacks. After the confiscation, they were almost all arson. Confiscating the guns stopped the gun violence, but made almost no difference in the actual violence. It was a great demonstration that the guns aren’t the problem.
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Democrats in Illinois and Chicago habitually blame Chicago’s astronomical murder rate on guns that sneak in from all those benighted states and cities that lack Chicago’s ‘reasonable gun control’.
What they can’t explain is why those guns have to travel all the way to Chicago to kill people. Surely if it’s the guns’ fault, the places they hail from would have even higher murder rates than Chicago, right? They have all those excess guns, after all.
But somehow, it’s only Chicago where half a dozen random murders are just an average weekend.
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