Just a few hours before a gunman walked into a school in Connecticut on Friday and slaughtered 20 small children, a disturbed man with a knife walked into a school in central China and attacked 22 children of about the same age.
Police and emergency services responded within minutes to the attack at the Sandy Hook elementary school. However, they were too late to stop the man, identified by US media as 20-year-old Adam Lanza, from taking the lives of 20 six- and seven-year-olds and six adults before turning his guns on himself.
Meanwhile, at the Chenpeng village primary school in a rural part of Henan province, not one person was killed even though the assailant, 36-year-old Min Yingjun, was able to wander the school attacking defenceless children for more than half an hour, according to Chinese news reports.
The stark difference in death tolls from these ostensibly similar atrocities has been greeted in China and among US supporters of gun controls as powerful evidence of the efficacy of banning guns. Firearms are almost entirely absent from Chinese society and Chinese police do not routinely carry handguns. According to data compiled by the UN office on drugs and crime, the murder rate in the US is more than four times the rate in China.
"Not only is it appalling that these shooting massacres keep recurring but the American government's inaction is also shocking," said Hu Xijin, chief editor of state-controlled newspaper Global Times. "Isn't this a human rights disaster? . . . I don't understand how American parents can put up with it." An editorial published by Xinhua, the official government news wire, said the "blood and tears" of Friday's victims "demand no delay for the US gun control."
In recent years, China has seen numerous school attacks involving crazed knife-wielding men. A string of six attacks between March and May 2010 left scores injured and at least 17 dead, most of them kindergarten or primary schoolchildren. Two months ago, a man with a machete killed three children and injured 13 others in a private day-care centre in southwest China.

