Crazy people are only dangerous when guns are easily available!

As we know, Aaron Alexis had a gun and was crazy.

This crazy man didn’t have a gun. Instead, he pushed a woman in front of a train.

As CBS 2’s John Slattery reported, it was the last thing the young woman must have expected – being pushed by a man routinely hanging around the White Plains station.

“A homeless man hangs out in front here — decides he wants to inflict some pain to somebody, asks somebody for change,” said newsstand operator Gary Waxman. “And one girl upstairs decides to come out of bathroom. She refused to give him money, and he pushed her in front of the train.”

It was an empty northbound Metro-North train pulling into the station that seriously injured the woman.

“Fingers were gone, legs were mangled — that’s what I heard from police. That’s what they told me,” Waxman said.

In a perverse irony, the man seems happy now with the knowledge that he will be taken care of:

The man who runs the newsstand said the attacker is a regular in the area.

“And he had no confession or nothing; he just stood there calmly and got arrested,” Waxman said.

Waxman said the man did not say anything that he heard, but, “I’m hearing through the grapevine that he mention that, ‘Now you’re going to take care of me.’ “

Another crazy man I blogged about didn’t have a gun. Instead he grabbed a saw from a contractor and sawed a subway passenger’s chest open.

We all know that Jared Loughner had a gun.

Here’s his picture.

But local crazy man Joseph Babcock did not have a gun. Instead he had bottles, which were freely available in a store.

Ann Arbor police Lt. Renee Bush said Babcock was a frequent customer at the store, but had been bothering some of the women cashiers.

When he came into the store Monday, Babcock went up to a service counter and threw two bottles of champagne at store employees, Bush said.

“They had no interaction until he randomly approached the counter and was throwing glass bottles at him,” Bush said on Monday.

It’s unknown if the champagne bottles were full when they were thrown — Bush said they weren’t by the time police got there — or what brand of champagne was used.

The brand of champagne bottle he used does not matter. What ought to matter is the easy availability of these deadly bottles to anyone walking into a store.

What got me about the Babcock story was his face.

I thought, “Hey, I’ve seen that look before!”

Babcock, Loughner, Alexis, and whatever the saw guy’s name was. They all have something in common. And if anyone thinks gun control will solve the problem, they’re whistling past the graveyard.

The problem is, what to do with crazy* people. When I was a kid, they were taken care of. Now, nothing happens until they snap. And when they snap, if it’s with a gun, everyone freaks out about guns. And if not, it’s just another story about a nut who went berserk but who didn’t use a gun.

The point is, when people go violently crazy, they can do violently crazy things with whatever means happen to be at their disposal. And when they act out with guns, society blames guns. But when they act out with saws, we don’t say the saw made them do it, when they act out with knives, we don’t say the knife made them do it, when they act out with bottles, we don’t say the bottle made them do it, and when they act out with hands, we don’t say their hands made them do it.

Blaming guns for what crazy people might do with them makes a lot of sense… if you hate guns.

These crime reports rarely if ever mention mental illness. Is no one crazy anymore? Or is everyone is crazy?

Sorry if I sound like a libertarian nut, but it strikes me that it is a hell of a lot easier to take away basic freedoms once there is no differentiation between the sane and the insane.

* I mean crazy, in the traditional sense of losing one’s mind. Not the sort of modern “behavioral health” crap that could mean anything and everything a psychologist might want it to mean.

UPDATE: Scissors.