Gun control advocates in the United States often use the prevention of mass shootings as justification for gun control. They argue that if there are no guns people can access, there can be no mass shootings.

Well, yeah. 

Granted, that's a gross oversimplification of their stance, but that's the essence of it boiled down to the most simple form possible. 

And it stands to reason that if there are no guns anywhere then there can't be mass shootings. We simply argue that it's not viable, that you can't eliminate guns nor prevent the desire to kill people be limiting the tools available to potential mass murderers.

Part of that was driven home over the weekend in Sydney, Australia where six people were killed in a mass stabbing.

At least six people were killed and eight injured after a man went on a stabbing spree at a Sydney shopping centre on Saturday.

Australian police and ambulance services confirmed the deaths and said that a female officer shot the attacker dead outside a discount shop in the mall.

Hundreds of people were evacuated from the Bondi Junction Westfield during a major police operation near Bondi Beach, with 40 emergency service vehicles in attendance.

Initially, five deaths were reported, but a sixth victim later died from their injuries in hospital.

A nine-month-old baby is among the injured, according to paramedics, and the child’s mother was among the fatalities.

Police Commissioner Karen Webb said the motive is unknown, but terrorism is not suspected.

Things are very raw at this stage,” assistant commissioner Anthony Cooke said in a press conference. “I do not have many details... it is a very big crime scene. This is about dealing with this terrible situation and making sure everybody is safe.”

Of course, this is from a particularly early report and they know a lot more about the attacker at this point. None of that is relevant to use because, well, it's Australia and he didn't use a gun, meaning they're not going to create new gun control laws.

Now, we're often told that gun control prevents mass shootings, but as noted, we've pointed out that removing guns doesn't prevent mass murder. There are other implements a potential murderer could use, including knives.

In response to this sort of thing, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese decided to get really, really stupid.

He's not excusing the murder, obviously--that would be political suicide--but he is justifying gun control in the wake of a stabbing attack.

Hundreds of lives would have been lost in a Sydney shopping centre killing rampage if Australia did not have strict gun laws, Anthony Albanese says.

The prime minister joined NSW Premier Chris Minns outside Westfield Bondi Junction on yesterday afternoon to lay flowers as the nation reeled from the random attack.

Queenslander [killer's name removed] stabbed six people to death and seriously wounded 12 others on Saturday afternoon before being shot dead by Inspector Amy Scott.

Albanese said there was no doubt Scott saved lives and so too had Australia's robust gun controls, implemented following the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.

"This man wielded a deadly weapon in the form of a knife," the prime minister told ABC Radio Sydney.

"But if it was an automatic gun then we would have been speaking about hundreds of deaths.

"It is an important reminder of how important it is that we do have strong gun laws in this country."

Now, note that Albanese said if it had been an "automatic gun" (and he probably means semi-auto, but bear with me here) then it would have been hundreds of deaths, not that it could have been that high. He's making a claim of exactly what would have happened had it not been for Australia's gun control laws.

And, of course, it's absolute male bovine excrement.

First, let's look at the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, the Route 91 Harvest shooting in Las Vegas. That was a case of a killer with devices that could simulate fully automatic fire, shooting from an elevated position down into a crowd.

He killed 60 people in a horrific nightmare of a massacre.

But this dipstick would totally have killed hundreds of people in a shopping center.

Yeah, pull the other one. It's got bells and stuff.

I think it's pretty obvious that this claim is farcical at just a surface-level glance. Especially if we figure Albanese meant sem-automatic weapons.

I can make a much better case that the fact that a knife was used may well have resulted in more casualties.

Six people were killed and 12 were injured in this attack.

In 2022, the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs made a ton of headlines. It grabbed ahold of the media and became a story for months afterward. In that killing, though, five people were killed and 19 injured by gunfire.

That same year, in Raleigh, North Carolina, a killer went on a rampage, killing five people and injuring two others.

The Warren Clinic shooting in Tulsa, also in 2022, claimed five people's lives.

My point here is that while Albanese can try to claim that hundreds would have been killed, but in each of the cases I mentioned here, what happened when the shooting started? People ran. They tried to get away because they knew not just what was happening but roughly where it was happening.

With a knife, that's not a thing. You know something is happening, but not what and you don't necessarily know where. As a result, a killer can easily disguise what he's doing, move with the crowd, and kill more people than he might with a firearm.

Further, we do know that yet again, a madman was put down by someone with a gun. In this case, it happened to be a cop, but if she hadn't been there, how many more would have been murdered? Especially since the only one who could have carried would have been a cop under Australia's gun control laws.

What happened in Sydney is an absolutely horrible thing.

But there's no way you can definitively say it would have been worse with a gun when we have plenty of less deadly mass shootings in a nation that supposedly has "worse" gun control laws.