Gun ban wouldn’t end murders

Before 2013 gets much older Congress will pass, and President Obama will sign, a new anti-gun law. It will join the 300-plus federal, state and local anti-gun laws. The left will swoon in paroxysms of joy. Murders will continue without so much as a hiccup. In time there will be another headline-grabbing murder and we’ll go through the same wailings we’ve been enduring since JFK’s murder 50 years ago: “We need tougher gun laws!”

The problem of murder will never be solved until emotion-driven, vote-hungry politicians give up their simplistic, naive assumption that murders are committed by guns — that the people who use them are, apparently, helpless victims of their guns.

Step one in reducing murders (they cannot be stopped) is recognizing that guns are inanimate objects. They are nothing more than collections of steel parts, utterly useless until someone picks one up and decides what to do with it: pound a nail, shoot tin cans, use as a paper weight, shoot at someone, or fire into the air.

Spelling errors are not caused by pencils. Drunken driving is not caused by cars. Obesity is not caused by forks. Murder is not caused by guns. There is one common denominator to all four of these representative devices: people.

Will Congress ban pencils to improve spelling, ban cars to eliminate drunken driving and ban forks to end obesity? Of course not. But will it ban guns? Incredibly, that precise possibility exists. And if Congress ever does repeal the Second Amendment, murders will continue without so much as a hiccup.

Don Frost

Rolling Meadows