re: Why don't liberals push for banning handguns?

Emotionally, I understand the reflexive reasoning. You can't kill 59 people at one time with a knife. You're either attacking isolated people or, if in a large crowd, you'll be attacked and restrained long before you can stab that many people. Moreover, knife wound are less lethal than those inflicted by bullets, particularly those of higher caliber. A knife wound to your leg or arm, for instance, but be precisely placed to achieve the level of bleeding required for lethality. A bullet on the other hand produces both concussive force and shrapnel that can achieve the rupture of major peripheral blood vessels without the initial impact striking them. Stab wounds to the abdomen are generally suvivable given medical assistance, bullet wounds to the abdomen however are far more difficult to treat.

The argument for handguns is more difficult to make on an emotional level because a skilled user could easily inflict numerous deaths quickly. That being said, most making the argument conceptually think of higher caliber rifles to be "more deadly", despite this generally being nonsense.

Logically speaking however, it makes little sense. Sure I can't kill 59 people at once with a knife, but I can kill 59 people with a knife over the course of days or months and am less likely to be caught than someone doing the same with a gun. Is that "better" than killing them all at once? It doesnt carry the same emotional weight, but I submit it isnt any worse in any meaningful way.

Take something like a car however. Had someone driven a car at a high rate of speed through that same crowd, I can GUARANTEE you more than 59 people would have died. Hundreds would have been killed if a vehicle large enough to not get stuck in the mass of humanity as the bodies piled up was used. I also submit that would have been easier to carry out than what actually occurred, as obtaining such a vehicle requires nothing more than a driver's license and a signature.