Two are killed and 1 is critically wounded in New York City knife rampage. A suspect is in custody.

Surprise! The same thing is happening in America as happened in the UK and Japan. Where guns are severely restricted, knives are used. We are not told how Cain killed Abel. Perhaps he hit him over the head with a rock. But as a remedy, the Lord decreed, “Thou shalt not murder.” He did not decree, “Thou shalt not hit people with rocks.” It is murder that is wrong, not misuse of rocks.

Anti-gun activists claim that gun “availability” is the problem. Clearly, if guns were totally unavailable, none would be used. This situation occurred in the Middle Ages, before the invention of guns, but the time was very violent. People rarely dared to go out at night, and travel away from home was unusual. Oh yes, there were sword deaths, knife deaths, axe deaths, spear deaths, club deaths, arrow deaths, beating deaths, and strangling deaths. But there were no “gun deaths,” so presumably advocates of gun confiscation would have felt safe living in the days of “Braveheart” and the Crusades.

Growing up, I vaguely knew there was a shotgun and a box of shells in my father’s closet. But I would never have thought of entering the closet without his permission, much less taking the gun. Even after he died, I had to wait for my mother before I entered his closet to clear out his things.

The shotgun was “available” in the sense of being physically accessible, but it was totally unavailable in the sense of being useful to me to murder a classmate no matter how I was bullied, or a teacher no matter how I was mistreated.

So long as guns, or knives, or baseball bats, or other potential weapons are “available” in the sense of being useful to murder fellow human beings, we will have a major problem. All the gun control laws in the world won’t help us. We need “Thou shalt not murder.”