By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
A bloody stabbing rampage that left 22 students and adults injured, but all alive, at a western Pennsylvania high school provided several examples of courage, but no pad from which gun prohibitionists could launch another attack on the Second Amendment.
Sixteen-year-old Alex Hribal has been charged as an adult with four counts of attempted murder and 21 counts of aggravated assault, according to the Associated Press and various published reports.
But instead of entering the school with a gun, Hribal allegedly used two long-bladed kitchen knives to stab and slash his victims until he was tackled by an assistant principal with the help of a student. They held him until a school police officer placed the teen in handcuffs.
The incident could not be exploited by gun prohibition lobbyists because the suspect used a common household kitchen implement.
The attack occurred during the morning not long after school opened for the day, with students moving through the hallways as normal. Once the attack started, however, at least one student wisely pulled a fire alarm so that others would start evacuating. Various news reports tell of heroic students administering first aid to some victims, while other stories told of how male students jumped in front of female students to protect them, and suffered stab wounds as a result.
Authorities were not able to immediately determine what precipitated the attack, but there were reports that Hribal had been bullied. Some reports described him as something of a quiet loner. The Associated Press reported that after he was arrested, the teen allegedly suggested that he wanted to die.
Published reports say the teen remained silent during the attack, which lasted approximately five minutes.
Press reports were quick to acknowledge that, for many years, schools across the country have concentrated their emergency training efforts on dealing with mass shootings.
But the attack creates something of a quandary for anti-gunners who might have used the case to ramp up rhetoric about such things as “universal background checks” being necessary for all firearms transactions, or other measures that seem only to inconvenience law-abiding gun owners.
Knives are an entirely different dilemma because they can be found in virtually every home in the country. The Knife Rights organization issued a brief statement following the attack, expressing sympathy for what it called “an appalling and senseless attack” at Franklin Regional High School. The group has pushed for reform of knife laws because knives fall under the definition of “arms” that existed when the Second Amendment was written.
