More Cypresses and Fewer Newtowns

Every time there's a shooting at a school or a college campus and 10 or 20 people die, the NRA tells us that the problem isn't guns, it's crazy people. Or video games. Or mean moms. They'll trot out statistics that say that hammers kill more people than shotguns or rifles.

Of course, that's a total load of horse hockey, and here are the numbers they cite, for murders in 2011:

• Shotguns: 356
• Rifles: 323
• Handguns: 6,220
• Other guns: 1,684
• Knives: 1,694
• All forms of blunt objects, including hammers, golf clubs, tire irons, Academy Award trophies, pool cues, candle sticks, lead pipes and so on: 496
• Explosives: 12
• Total firearms: 8,583
• Total murders: 12,664

Because the FBI statistics don't separate out the numbers, there's no way to know how many murders were committed with just hammers, though it's obviously less than shotguns or rifles. But the NRA phrases things in the most misleading way possible, implying that hammers kill more people than shotguns and rifles, and by extension, all guns.

It is a statistic that is totally misleading. Guns kill 67% of all murder victims, and hammer-like objects kill only 3.9%.

Note that explosives killed only 12 people, yet we have far greater government oversight of the sale of dynamite and fertilizer than we do of guns. (That's due, in part, to that self-proclaimed patriot Timothy McVeigh, a man who sounded all the same notes the NRA is sounding today.)

Which brings us to the atrocity of the day. a kid in Cypress, Texas went nuts and stabbed people at a Texas community college Tuesday. At least 12 people are in the hospital, and two are still in critical condition.

So far, no one has died. But if this kid had had a gun, we know from long and bitter experience that there would be a much higher body count. Because guns are so much better at killing people than knives. Or hammers.

Better gun control laws will simply give us more Cypresses and fewer Newtowns.

No reasonable person thinks that proposed legislation for background checks, smaller magazine capacities and assault rifle bans will stop all killing. We're not saying no one can have guns. We're just trying to reduce the number of guns in the hands of nut jobs, terrorists and criminals, knowing that it will only reduce the carnage, not eliminate it altogether.

But that's still a worthwhile goal: we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on medical research, hospitals, fire departments, and police departments, trying to reduce the number of people who die, but knowing full well that we won't be able to save everyone. If background checks on all gun purchases will cut down the eight thousand gun deaths each year by one thousand or two thousand or three thousand, it's well worth it.

And it's not just the loss of life. Reduced carnage will also save billions of dollars each year in lost wages, hospital costs, orphans going on Social Security, funeral expenses, expensive death penalty trials, endless lawyers' fees on appeals, prison guard salaries, and so on.

In the Sixties and Seventies conservatives warned that losing Vietnam would mean total world domination by communism and the destruction of freedom. Conservatives are now warning that background checks on gun purchases will lead to a communist takeover of our government and the destruction of freedom.

The slippery slopes and domino theories about gun laws and freedom are just the conservatives crying wolf about Vietnam all over again. The same people who had a vested interest in continuing the carnage in southeast Asia (gun manufacturers and their NRA shills), have the same vested interest in continuing the carnage in our streets and schools today.