A lot of people in the Second Amendment world don’t like the phrase “gun violence.” After all, it tries to make a violent crime committed with a firearm sound like it’s more sinister than one committed with a knife.

Yet I’ve always just considered it a term differentiating various kinds of violent crimes, but that’s just me.

In Pennsylvania, there’s a debate about whether to use the term or not, though. They’re trying to address the issue, and at least one op-ed thinks bipartisanship is needed.

If a person is intent on killing someone and doesn’t have a gun, he or she will find some other means for committing the crime.

That must be kept in mind as the Pennsylvania General Assembly, amid its 2022-23 budget-preparation work currently underway, considers how to allocate funds most effectively to try to reduce gun violence in the commonwealth.

It is important that whenever the available funds are directed, those dollars reach the programs with the best track record for “cooling off” potentially deadly circumstances before they reach the point of someone pulling a trigger or resorting to an alternative deadly option.

There are numerous programs with those goals and approaches in existence. Again, the key is to determine which already are achieving good results, and to provide incentives for others to ramp up their effectiveness, to merit additional funding in the future.

Gun violence is not going to go away, but a governmental effort aimed at confiscating law-abiding people’s guns is not a workable tactic for making great inroads regarding the problem, which claimed more than 4,600 Pennsylvania residents’ lives over the past three years.

There’s not a word of this I don’t agree with. Not one.

Among the programs being considered are mental health programs, support programs for survivors of gun violence, and outreach activities.

Should bipartisanship happen on this? Absolutely.

Even if you believe gun control is the answer–it’s not, but let’s pretend–why wouldn’t you also support measures that may help in a myriad of cases where restricting firearms won’t? Surely no one thinks gun control would stop all violent crime, so why not?

With the debate over guns, all too often we lose sight of trying to do the things we actually can do. Democrats become so focused on gun control that they often ignore pretty much everything else that could possibly be done to combat violence on our streets.

For them, it seems the problem is the gun, not the violence itself.

Yet as a person who has lost someone they care about to that same violence, I wouldn’t have felt better if they’d been stabbed to death. They’d still have been gone.

But what if the mental health programs in Seattle had managed to treat the maniac before he ever decided to take a human life? My friend would still be alive.

So yeah, I think bipartisanship should happen, and I think this is a case where it can happen, but only if certain parties recognize that this is where the common ground lies.