Chinese children injured in knife attack outside primary school

[adieu]

49. Two incidents over two years

in a country with a population of 1.6 billion is a very, very small blip. Yes, it's preventable and it's clearly unfortunate, but it's not an indication that existing laws in China are not adequately dealing with mass knife stabbings at schools. New laws need not be legislated (even though they apparently did after the first incidence).

The question is how many until it gets to be a problem?

No one wants their child to be hurt whether it's by gun or by knife, or even by a book falling off the shelves in the library. Negligence and accidents occur and they're unstoppable, only mitigated to a significant degree. If the occurrence of such wild lunatic actions such as the Chinese knife wielder or the Connecticut shooter, it may be worth categorizing them as purely accidental "acts of god".

The question is how high a frequency of such incidents before we have to say, "hey, this isn't categorizable as an act of god. We should do something about it."

For example, here in CA where I live, we have occasional earthquakes. If they occurred once every 200 or so years, we would not have instituted most of the building codes we have now. But, if we have earthquakes every 10 years or so, we take steps to mitigate their effects even though they're "acts of god". What's the frequency that makes us take action? I think one big Loma-Prieta sized one every 80 years is sufficient to make us take action. So what's the answer for human-instigated mass violence?

And, are all human-instigated mass violence the same? We in the United States took very drastic measures after 9/11, despite that being a once-in-a-lifetime incident (and those measures were not only ineffectual, they're down right misdirected), yet we have mass shootings once every three weeks or so, on average, and we make no appreciable changes to the laws on gun usage or access.