China is reeling from a recent knife attack that claimed the lives of 33 persons:
Authorities on Sunday blamed a slashing rampage that killed 29 people and wounded 143 at a train station in southern China on separatists from the country’s far west, while local residents said government crackdowns had taken their toll on the alleged culprits.
Police fatally shot four of the assailants — putting the overall death toll at 33 — and captured another after the attack late Saturday in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, the official Xinhua News Agency said. But authorities were searching for at least five more of the black-clad attackers.
Tragedies such as this point out something that we must all come to accept. Humans are creative creatures. Our creativity can be used for both good and evil. Gun control advocates focus their attention on wanting to prohibit firearms. Prohibitions against weapons, like any prohibitions, don’t work because human creativity will render it meaningless in a short period of time. History has shown us this with alcohol prohibition in the United States and we see it today with the war on unpatentable drugs.
An absence of guns simply means other weapons will be used and in our creative hands everything is a weapon. The chemicals under my bathroom sink can be mixed into a rather unpleasant gas. My kitchen contains numerous sharp objects that, as the linked story demonstrates, can cause a great deal of harm in a fairly short period of time.
Prohibitions are pointless. They throw a lot of innocent people in cages and fail to hinder the evil in any ways. This is why I feel we need to stop implementing prohibitions and start focusing on identifying the causes of society’s ills. Calls for prohibitions are a waster of time and effort and this is proven time and again whenever evil men are able to accomplish their goals when prohibitions that were supposed to hinder them are in place.