It’s started, and took less than 24 hours. The parents of “suspect” Elliot Rodger, who is believed to have murdered 6 and injured several more people in Isla Vista, California, are blaming guns for their son’s crime. A.W.R Hawkins writes in Breitbart:

On May 24, the family of Santa Barbara shooting suspect Elliot Rodger released a statement through their attorney saying they are "against guns" and support gun control. (snip)

According to the Post and Courier, attorney Alan Shifman spoke on behalf of the family, saying: "My client's mission in life will be to try to prevent any such tragedies from happening again. This country, this world, needs to address mental illness and the ramifications from not recognizing these illnesses."

Shifman also said the Rodger family is "staunchly against guns" and "supports gun-control laws."

While it is understandable, perhaps, to wish to deflect their own responsibility in having raised someone who is “suspected” of being a homicidal madman and not seeing to it that he was institutionalized, the inconvenient fact is that the first three victims were murdered by use of a knife or knives. Total gun confiscation would not have saved half of the homicide victims. And Rodger’s rampage injured other people with his car, deliberately steering into a bicyclist and a skateboarder.

Quite clearly, he is “suspected” of using whatever weapons were at hand to allegedly kill and injure people in a rage.

Unless we decide to ban knives, cars, and, heck, all sharp and blunt objects, we cannot prevent those afflicted with insane rage from harming others, And there is always strangulation, of course. We can’t ban hands, can we?

Guns, knives, hammers, bombs, and other potentially lethal weapons require human will to become deadly. They are not themselves evil or good.

I pity Mr. and Mrs. Rodgers, and I have far more sympathy for the victims and their relatives and friends. But deflecting blame onto an inanimate tool is foolish and ultimately cowardly, if used to evade personal responsibility as parents of a young man who inflicted evil on the world.