We spend a lot of our time addressing the claims of gun control advocates. In particular, regarding “gun violence.”

Many bristle at the term, and for good reason, but we understand what it means. It’s violence committed with a firearm.

Yet, what bothers me about it is that it ignores every other form of violent crime. It’s as if homicides like this one in North Carolina don’t matter.

Two men have been arrested after a 30-year-old man was beaten to death in Rocky Mount.

Darnell Battle was assaulted on the front porch of his family home on Jan. 5 by two men. On Friday, Dontarious Whitehead and Mark Lee Smith were arrested and charged with first degree murder.

Battle’s brother Brandon told WRAL he heard a fight outside their door here, and when he came outside he found his brother badly beaten, saying he couldn’t breathe.

Battle died from his injuries – and his mother has now lost two sons in just the past three months.

The investigation revealed Smith and Whitehead were attending a party at a home on Branch Street when they encountered Battle in the road in front of the home. Smith and Whitehead began to argue with Battle, which escalated into a fight. Minutes later, Battle died from his injuries.

In other words, Battle wasn’t shot to death but beaten to death.

Even if gun control did everything it promised, it couldn’t have stopped this homicide from happening. There’s nothing that it could do.

Yet, is Battle any less dead? Does his murder somehow count for less because a gun wasn’t involved?

This isn’t isolated, either. “Personal weapons,” which means hands and feet, kill more people every year than AR-15s, which are so vilified in the press.

Further, cases like this don’t get the attention that a shooting does.

What matters, though, is the person or people who do something like this. They didn’t need a gun to take human life. They didn’t need to skirt gun control laws to obtain a weapon to claim a human life. They just decided to kill someone and beat the person to death.

Gun control can never prevent this kind of thing because it focuses on the wrong thing. It focuses on the weapons, not the people.

Law-abiding citizens could have a nuclear weapon and never misuse it. Everyone would be perfectly safe.

The criminally minded, however, clearly don’t need a weapon to take a human life.

Please, folks. Please, let’s start focusing on the people who take lives and hurt innocent people, and stop pretending the real problem is guns.

Gun control cannot make us all safe.

But gun control can make it so that people like these two never have to face the possibility of someone having the means to even the odds. That’s what guns can do for the law-abiding citizen and why gun control can and should be so vehemently opposed, especially since it cannot stop murders like this one.