If you debate the Second Amendment on social media, you’ve heard it.

In this case, “it” would be the argument that guns make murder easier. I even acknowledged it when I wrote about a man who killed four people in California with a knife on Thursday.

While four people are dead, the thinking goes he could have killed so many more if he’d used a gun. They won’t accept that violent, evil people will still be both violent and evil regardless of whatever gun control laws exist.

Over at our sister site Red State, Brandon Morse offered his thoughts on that particular argument.

“Brandon, a gun will make it way easier to kill people than a knife. More people would have died if the killer had a gun,” is usually the comeback I get after noting that a killer will kill whether he has a gun or not.

And they’re not wrong. Guns make it far easier to kill people than using knives.

When it comes to these stories, though, there’s a complete disregard for how guns play a part in the lives of the law-abiding. When we see a complete absence of firearms in a society, we see that the violent suddenly have an advantage. To see this, we need only look to London.

The United Kingdom has oppressive restrictions on firearms to the point where they might as well be completely banned. They did this in order to make the populace safer, but the exact opposite happened. London’s knife crime skyrocketed with the best use of self-defense now out of reach.

It skyrocketed so high that last year, London’s murder rate surpassed New York, with knives being the favored weapon. As a result, the U.K. has tried to launch cringe-worthy campaigns to dissuade knife crime and even asked private citizens to give up their knives, including “knife bins” where you can dispose of your cutlery. In one case, at least, these knife bins ended up being a gift to violent criminals.

I encourage you to read the whole thing because Morse did an outstanding job.

Here’s something people need to think about. When it comes to violent people, they will make use of whatever weapons they can get their hands on. Blunt objects like hammers, pipes, and even rocks are used more often to murder people than something like an AR-15. They don’t need guns to be violent.

Further, violent criminals have every advantage. They get to pick the time, place, and nature of a violent attack. We, the good guys, only get to play defense. We have to adjust.

If you ban guns, though, we’re at an even bigger disadvantage than we already are. Guns are equalizers. They allow us to meet these violent threats in a way that gives us a bit of an advantage, one that only levels the playing field and allows us to walk away from the encounter.

Imagine, if you will, that the individual I wrote about Thursday had attacked someone with a knife, but his victim had a gun. How would that incident have played out instead? I doubt any of us would have heard much about it. If Bearing Arms had run the story, it would have been another good guy with a gun tale.

When you eliminate guns, you don’t make murder more difficult. You make it easier.

The only thing you inhibit is self-defense.