You nailed half of it. Mental illness. That's the key to reducing these things.
It's part of the key...only part and it's not one with easy solutions because of privacy rights and individual civil rights.
Then maybe it's time some of those be adjusted.
In what way? And, why just adjust for mental illness? Why not tackle the easy availability of guns?
People slaughtered each other just fine long before gunpowder was invented. And arguably, a maniac with a knife in crowded venue can get a much higher body count since the actor wouldn't be as obvious as someone squeezing off shots. Guy with a knife is moreor less discreet unless in your line of sight. Great big crowd like sporting event though, can slash and stab their way a long time before anyone'd know who the heck the bad guy was.
Do you have any real life comparisons for that? A person with a knife needs to get close to attack and can more easily be overcome because he is close. A person with a gun can do a lot of damage from a distance before being subdued.
"Of the 11 mass murders by a single person using a knife known to us, there were 46 murdered, and 139 wounded. The average mass murder/attempt knife incident resulted in 16 casualties."
Edged Weapon Mass Murder
"On March 23rd, 35-year-old Binh Thai Luc walked into an Ingleside house in San Francisco. When he left, he left five mutilated bodies: an elderly couple, their son Vincent Lei, their daughter Jess Lei, and Vincent’s girlfriend Chia Huei Chu. The deaths were not inflicted by gunshot wounds as initially suspected, but by blunt trauma from an edged weapon, most likely a machete."
Mass Murder in San Francisco
Guy above did his 5 murders and left the scene and no one had any idea it'd happened.
"What Calgary police chief Rick Hanson called the "worst mass murder" in the city’s history didn’t end at the barrel of a gun.
Instead, the 22-year-old suspect identified on Tuesday as Matthew de Grood is accused of entering the kitchen at a house party, taking “a large knife” and using it to fatally stab four men and one woman, all of whom were students in their 20s.
The scene was “horrific,” Hanson told reporters.
Matthew de Grood, the suspect in the killings of five people, graduated from the University of Calgary and was admitted to attend law school in the fall. (Facebook)
But as police continue to investigate, the tragedy was also a grave reminder that stabbings top the list when it comes to violent crime in the country, with Statistics Canada reporting in 2008 that one-third of homicides or attempted murders involved knives — more than any other type of weapon, including firearms."
Calgary stabbings: How knife crime in Canada can cause 'moral panic'
Firearms require training. A knife doesn't, or at least not nearly as much. Walk up to someone and push it into their flesh, not that hard.