I’m sure most, if not all of us have heard the phrase, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

In the self-defense community, that’s often taken to mean that one shouldn’t rely exclusively on their gun to bail them out of trouble as suddenly every problem looks like a “shoot them” kind of thing when, well, it’s not. Deescalation techniques and unarmed self-defense are just as important.

But it doesn’t just relegate itself to that world, either. A lot of people see the world as if it were full of nails.

That includes the gun control crowd.

Take this incident in Michigan as an example.

Oak Park police are still searching for a suspect after a shooting Friday outside the city’s high school that wounded two students and stunned the community.

The violence followed a homecoming football game Oct. 6. Among others, the shooting caught the attention of Kermit Williams with the nonprofit End Gun Violence Michigan, and a former president of the Pontiac City Council.

EGVM’s goal is to pass gun violence prevention laws in the state to save lives.

“We’ve been able to pass common sense gun reform in Michigan and we are working on getting domestic violence gun safety laws,” he said. “This year (the state Legislature) passed universal background checks (for gun owners), safe gun storage, and extreme protection orders from judges.”

Those laws are expected to go into effect in March 2024.

EGVM, where Williams serves on the steering committee, deals “specifically with Black and brown communities,” he said. “I think the shooting in Oak Park speaks to the fact that inappropriate gun use is ruining childhoods throughout Michigan. I think being able to go to a high school game without the fear of violence is as American as apple pie.

“We are praying for Oak Park,” he added, “but we are also praying that this generation of children can live in safe and thriving neighborhoods.”

Now, I don’t think anyone is fine with school kids getting shot.

What bugs me here is how Williams immediately goes to talk about gun control when we literally don’t know who shot these kids.

Even anti-gunners seemingly know that gun control doesn’t actually stop criminals from getting or using guns. After all, New Mexico’s Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham acknowledged that her ban on the carry of firearms in Albuquerque wasn’t going to stop bad guys from carrying, so why would it be different anywhere else?

But the problem is that Williams, like so many other gun control advocates, doesn’t seem to have another tool in the toolbox. All they have is gun control and they think that’s the panacea of alternatives to the violence. They’ve convinced themselves that if you just get enough restrictions, suddenly there will be peace in our time.

So, when there’s a shooting, they don’t ask questions, they just leap to gun control. After all, to them, the answers won’t matter.

It won’t matter if the guns came in from out of state, the answer will still be Michigan needing to pass gun control. It doesn’t matter if they were stolen, the answer will still be Michigan needing to pass gun control. It’s always the same broken record and nothing will change in their brains.

See, most people who support gun rights are open to the idea that it won’t just make everything magically better. We’re just saying that it’s a preferable state to what we have now where many don’t even have a choice about defending themselves.

The difference is that gun control isn’t even a real hammer that can solve an actual nail of a problem. In reality, it’s a plastic toy like the kind your kid walks around with and pretends to fix the house. It doesn’t do anything, but he sure feels pretty special with it.