On the same day as the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., another madman attacked little children outside a primary school many thousands of miles away.
This assault did not get remotely as much attention as the horror in Connecticut, so it may come as news to you. It occurred in Chengping, a village in central China.
Some circumstances in the two outrages are strikingly similar. The number of victims in Chengping, 22 children and 1 adult, was comparable to the toll of 20 children and 6 adults in the killing spree at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The ages of the Chinese students, some as young as 6 years old, were roughly the same as those in Connecticut.
There was one enormous difference, however. Unlike the monstr ous outcome in Newtown, all the children in Chengping survived. A second difference explains the first: The weapon used by the assailant, a 36-year-old man, was a knife.
Sure, knives can kill. Lunatics in China have killed schoolchildren in a rash of bizarre knife attacks like this latest one. But the body count there is nothing like the carnage inflicted by the Sandy Hook gunman, Adam Lanza, and by his brethren in this country's expanding corps of mass murderers armed with assault rifles and semiautomatic pistols capable of firing multiple high-velocity rounds.
With a knife, you can kill one at a time. With the military-style weaponry that is readily available in this country, the slaughter is limitless.
That elementary fact lies at the heart of the message being carried with deepened fervor by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has made himself an avatar of gun-control advocacy, not to mention top enemy of the National Rifle Association, a label that he justifiably wears with pride.
There is no denying the righteousness that the mayor brings to this issue, one that he, along with many others, regards as nothing less than a matter of national security. In public appearances over the last couple of days, he did not use the Chengping experience as a reference, but he drew the same lessons that it provides. They are eminently sensible:
You will never end killing. You will not eliminate bursts of insanity. But the least that a civilized country can do is limit the death toll, by making it harder for a madman to turn a schoolroom or a house of worship or a shopping mall into an abattoir.
No other industrialized nation, the mayor said, allows its citizens to stockpile weapons and amm unition that “can be used to kill large numbers of people quickly.†While the Second Amendment guarantees a right to “keep and bear arms,†it does not, he suggested, guarantee a right to keep and bear devastating arms, capable of inflicting mass death and intended principally for service on a battlefield.
On Monday, Mr. Bloomberg intensified his demand that President Obama and Congress stop talking about how awful the violence is and start doing something to rein in the assault weapons, the high-capacity magazines and the gun trafficking.
In his role as co-chairman of Mayors Against Illegal Guns (with Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston), Mr. Bloomberg unveiled a campaign called “I Demand a Plan.†Its emotional core is a series of videos, prepared before the Newtown massacre, with 34 survivors of firearms violence or relatives of victims speaking about their pain and appeali ng for federal action.
Some of them were among 45 people who stood behind Mr. Bloomberg at a City Hall news conference on Monday. They formed a quorum of misery, bearing the scars of horrors whose place names are etched indelibly into the tormented American soul: Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora, Oak Creek.
They included Mary Reed, shot three times by the gunman who killed six people and gravely wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords near Tucson, Ariz., in January 2011. She still has a bullet lodged in her back, Ms. Reed told me. What she did not mention was that she was shot as she threw herself upon her teenage daughter, Emma, to shield her from harm.
“We're a community of people you really don't want to belong to,†Ms. Reed said of the group who stood with the mayor. “But it is a community of heart and soul. They're more than family now. We've walked through hell.â€
All that she wanted, and all that Mr. Bloomberg urged, was for Washington to impose a few common-sense restrictions that might save lives and spare others from joining the unhappy club of those on that forced march through hell.
E-mail Clyde Haberman: haberman@nytimes.com
