"I thought it was a drive-by or something, as fast as the bullets were going off," he said.
A knife doesn't move as fast as a bullet does, but its impact area is small, so the force is highly concentrated.
It is as if, when Kenny Morse puts on his Nicole Miller vest, he becomes a modest superhero, one who travels not as fast as a speeding bullet but, still, at sixty-five miles an hour, quite fast.
Some might blame Alexander and Ilya Salkind, the movie producers who would not quit while they were ahead: their first Christopher Reeve "Superman" movie, a charming entertainment of 1978, was followed by sequels whose narratives did not advance as fast as a speeding bullet but lumbered incoherently at a pace that tried and finally exhausted the patience of the MTV generation.
But today a single high-speed camera can allow us to see events as fast as a speeding bullet - literally.
Now Japan Rail is about to embark on building a completely new Tokyo to Osaka line, with trains that will travel twice as fast as the old bullet train.
Alvias do not go as fast as Spain's AVE bullet trains, but still reach 155mph on AVE tracks and travel at a maximum of 137mph on normal gauge rails.
And magnetically propelled trains that would zoom between cities at record speeds of more than 300 miles per hour - twice as fast as Japan's popular "bullet" trains - are now running on an experimental basis in Europe and Japan.
But, as a semiautomatic, it can fire individual bullets as fast as the trigger can be squeezed.
The proposed assault weapons ban would eliminate the sale of weapons designed, as Mr Obama said, "to pump out as many bullets as fast as possible".
Mateen, who was once on an FBI watchlist for possible ties to terrorism, legally purchased a semiautomatic assault-style rifle capable of spraying bullets as fast as the shooter can pull the trigger.
