New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s aide Carey Gabay died last night. He was an innocent bystander when rival gang members in New York City decided to settle their differences with weapons instead of words. The bullet that struck Gabay reportedly came from an illegal MAC-10 submachine gun. The suspects remain at large, and the weapons involved have not been recovered.

Perhaps we shouldn’t consider it surprising in the slightest that a journalist friend of Gabay’s, Farah Stockman, learned precisely nothing of value from Gabay’s death. Instead, she’s using the murder to try to get the left-wing, anti-police group Black Lives Matter to take up a cause they have no interest in supporting, gun control.

I applaud the Black Lives Matter movement for calling attention to the festering problem of police shootings, which have taken the lives of 980 Americans this year, including at least 74 unarmed black people.

But I don’t understand why gun control is not on their agenda. The recently-released Campaign Zero, set up by Black Lives Matter activists, presents 10 policy solutions — including better training, body cameras, limits on the use of force, and independent investigations of police killings — to curb the violence. Good on them for proposing solutions, many of which are solid ideas.

But it feels like they’re ignoring the obvious: If there were fewer guns on the street, there would be fewer shootings, including by police. Campaign Zero’s impressive website contains a graph that compares the number of people killed by police in the United States (1,100 in 2014) to the number killed in Germany (six), Australia (six), Britain (two), and Japan (none.)

It fails to mention that the big difference between the United States and those countries is not body cameras, or police training, but gun laws, plain and simple.

No, Ms. Stockman, the difference is not “gun laws, plain and simple.”

It is true to note that we do recognize the basic human right to armed self defense in the United States. That pre-existing natural right of all people has been stripped away from the citizens of most nations by their governments, “for the greater good.”

We refuse to give up that right, and in fact enshrined it in the Bill of Rights because the Founders knew their world history far better than most leaders today. They knew that governments inevitably value their own selfish interests over the interests of citizens and subjects, and have shown no restraint whatsoever to slaughtering their own people to enforce their will.

That philosophy of disarmament “for the greater good” so universally loved by socialists, communists, and other totalitarians created the conditions for the democide of 262 million people in the 20th Century alone.

Our Second Amendment rights ensure that more than 100 million armed Americans civilians can keep even the most ambitious American tyrants in check. The most elite units in our military have made it very clear that they will lead the rebellion against and federal government that dares infringe upon that right. De oppresso liber, indeed.

No, Ms. Stockman. We do not have a “gun law” problem.

What we have is a thug culture problem.

We have a popular culture that celebrates gang warfare, narcotics trafficking, and misogyny. We have a culture that rewards laziness, tolerates stupidity, and shirks personal responsibility.

We have a President that pals around with domestic terrorists, arms narcotics trafficking organizations and foreign terrorists, sends representatives to the funerals of attempted cop killers, and who proudly embraces self-admitted violent former drug dealers on the national stage.

We don’t have a gun problem, ma’am.

We have a “pro-criminal culture” problem.

Black Lives Matter is in the thick of that pro-criminal culture, with members of the group actively calling for the murder of law enforcement officers, which some of their members have done, as recently as this week. Some—apparently not very good at logistics or demographics—also want to trigger a race war with whites.

Why don’t you start addressing your cultural problems, and leave our right to bear arms in defense of ourselves against these thugs and would-be tyrants alone.