Gun control, as most of us understand it, is a legislative issue. You push to pass laws at the various levels of government in an effort to reduce the number of guns.

I won’t say the number of guns in criminal hands because, well, that’s not how it works. We all know that. But it does reduce the number of guns in total. It’s just the good guys who end up disarmed.

However, for someone in one Louisiana town, it’s really all on the police.

Following the recent shootings in Abbeville one resident is using Facebook as his platform to keep his community in the know. Stephen Menard says he is closely connected with residents.  He’s tired of seeing families torn apart by gun violence. He says he feels the police department could do better with monitoring gun-control

They say they took 100 guns off of the street. Well, if you took over 100 guns off of the street you wouldn’t have violence every night. You wouldn’t have gunshots every night.

Menard says the police department also mentioned an increase of patrolling and security cameras.  However, he feels violence is increasing.

I think that second paragraph is a quote, but I’m not sure.

Now, Menard probably means well, but he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. His town of Abbeville, Louisiana has a population of around 12,000 people. While that’s a fairly small place, it’s not a tiny place.

Menard seems to believe that taking 100 guns off the street should, somehow, solve the issue of violence, but that would only be the case if just 100 people were an issue and they had no way to access more guns.

They do.

Even in a small town, the bad guys have ways of getting guns, even after the police take their firearms. They’ll continue to get firearms. You can blame the police for that if you like, but black-market gun sales are like any other crime. Police can only do something about it if they not just know who the players are, but when they’re conducting business. That’s easier said than done.

Abbeville isn’t a large enough city to have the resources to somehow monitor every criminal act in the city. Hell, no one has those kinds of resources.

Frankly, it sounds like Menard is just one of those people who want the police to work miracles without really understanding anything at all about how law enforcement actually works.

Not just that, though, but apparently he’s failed to note that violence is up pretty much everywhere. There doesn’t seem to be a town of any size that is immune to the violence surge we’ve been seeing. Why would Abbeville, Louisiana be immune? Sure, smaller communities are less likely to see as much as, say, Chicago or New York City, but that doesn’t mean they’re immune.

Again, I think Menard probably means well. He’s probably just a concerned citizen who doesn’t like what’s happening to his community and wants to do something about it.

I’m just saying it would be far better to stop complaining about the police not being sorcerers and focus on things that might actually do some good.