Scene of the crime in Shanghai's Baoshan district (courtesy globaltimes.cn)

“In a rare case of gun violence in China, a man fatally shot five people and beat a sixth to death, including some of his factory colleagues and a soldier,” abc.go.com reports. Got it? It’s rare. Because God forbid it wasn’t rare, right? Then the good folks at ABC couldn’t support civilian disarmament. Gun control and spree killings? That doesn’t compute! Aside from all the spree killings in Germany and the U.K. Oh, and Finland. I meant Norway. Do we count the tens of thousands of disarmed Mexicans murdered by cartels? Do I evoke Godwin’s Law? Anyway . . .

ABC tells the tale of the Chinese spree killer then feels obliged to add

Guns are hard to come by in China. Firearms are tightly controlled and private ownership is for the most part illegal. Citizens who have hunting permits may apply at their local police station for permission to own a hunting rifle.

Once you remove guns from the populace, spree killers disappear, right? Oh wait . . . he shot a soldier and took his gun. And then there’s knives. I guess the “rarity” of the Chinese spree killing thing—in a country known for the free flow of information—trumps all that. In theory.

26 COMMENTS

  1. This story must be fake propaganda.Clearly when there are strong gun laws there is no gun violence .Look at the gun free paradise of Chicago.

  2. Let’s not forget gasoline, matches and buses. The proper conclusion we can draw from China is that controlling objects is useless when the cause is found in the person.

  3. I don’t give an **** about what ABC says, my brother and I often spend months in China for work, I can assure you it is not rare. While using a gun may be more rare, the mass killing and injuries with a knife are common. In 2010 while I was there, they had a least a dozen hack and slash school incidents where someone with a really big knife when into schools and started chopping away. Oh, and it happened despite the fact in China many schools have security guards. The difference is the state media keeps it under covers unless of course the story is to large and they cannot contain it.

    • “While using a gun may be more rare, the mass killing and injuries with a knife are common. In 2010 while I was there, they had a least a dozen hack and slash school incidents where someone with a really big knife when into schools and started chopping away. Oh, and it happened despite the fact in China many schools have security guards. The difference is the state media keeps it under covers unless of course the story is to large and they cannot contain it.”
      +1

      There are a lot of mass murders are caused by disgruntled people with no political or religious motivation.
      Knives are not the only means though. Another way mass murders happen, some Chinese man who is mad at the world will get some mining dynamite, make a suicide vest, and detonate on a crowded bus.

    • Nope. No way. You’s a lyin!!! EVERYBODY knows that once guns be banned, violence be gone!!!!!

      (in case you weren’t 100% sure, that was sarcasm. I’m not really calling you a liar. I know how bad it can be over there at times.)

  4. Suicide rates are among the highest of the world in China.

    FoxCon, maker of a vast majority of printed circuit boards for pc’s, phones, etc., had to install safety nets around the building to prevent people from jumping out of the windows.

    Ya know, it’s like that when a disarmed populace is forced to work 12-14hr days, for months straight, with little pay, in poor working and housing conditions. Yep, they are bussed into the factory-prisons, and then forced to work and live at factory.

    It’s such a dream job that their primary escape was to go head-long out the windows, as a show of displeasure…

    So rather than addressing the issues, they put up nets.

    Kinda like mass-shootings and Gun-Control, wrong solution for the problem.

  5. Oh yeah – rare, as if we had any idea what goes on with the 2.5 billion Chinese and Indians.

  6. I checked some of the Shanghai ex-pat news sources and none had a exact name for the weapon. I had a native Mandarin friend read the Shanghai news and the translation could be a shotgun, but since he was a former soldier, he could have a rifle from his military service.
    This is the best English source I could find, you will see it was all about money.
    http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/791044.shtml#.Ucc6p8u9KSM

    Having spent some time in Shanghai and asking about guns, I can tell you rich and influential people have guns, they treat them like novelties, many dont ever have any ammo.

  7. Shouldn’t the headline read “Rare non-government gun violence” ?
    Since the Chinese have no qualms about massacring their own citizens and those in occupied lands.

    • I was scrolling down to say this. There has historically been plenty of gun violence in China. It’s just mostly been government-on-civilian violence, and for any number of reasons, doesn’t make the papers.

  8. Gun spree killings are rare in China, in large part due to gun control.

    I don’t want to live in China. I wonder if gun control proponents really do.

  9. In China the government approved method of spree killing is to run a tank over unarmed people until they quit wiggling. Very effective and saves on ammo.

  10. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/LF24Ad02.html

    “China is one of the world’s largest gun manufacturers, and many guns end up on the black market because of lax controls at factories and theft from armories. Ding said other black market guns in China were homemade weapons of poor quality. Other better-quality guns are smuggled into China through Myanmar. Prices for smuggled weapons range from about 500 to 2,000 yuan (US$73 to US$294), Ding said. ”

    So ABC is lying about guns being hard to come by. Illegal to come by, but still available to people, and for less money than here in the USA.

  11. There should be zero deaths by gun in the freedomless, state-controls-everything utopias that guys like Bloomberg want to impose upon us. This story is a complete contradiction.

  12. The uneducated people running around wanting to ban everything, really should feed their minds something other than junk food.

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