It’s the defining mark of left-liberal crime policy: Deal mainly with the tools, not the people who use them. Hence American liberals’ obsession with gun control. Of course, there are more guns than people in the United States—upwards of 300 million, in fact—and so any attempt to regulate their possession is doomed to minuscule success or, far more likely, total failure.

We’ve often wondered why left-leaning policymakers don’t propose to regulate the ownership of knives. Lots of people are injured and killed by knives, after all. In 2016, in fact, 1,604 people died from knife wounds in the United States. So why not ban them? Or at least regulate them?