First, we get the “straw man argument:”

London, England, is reminding Americans that gun control does not translate automatically to reducing violence.

(Is anyone, liberal or otherwise, arguing that it “automatically” translates?)

From there, Monday’s Wheeling News-Register editorial* ignores the long-term trend to cherry-pick the statistics:

In London, where firearms limits are far stricter than in the United States, there were 37 homicides during February and March. In New York City, the number was 35.

Here’s a graph of the annual homicide statistics for New York and London courtesy of the BBC:

And so the News-Register has picked the two months in which there were a total of two more homicides in London to prove its point. Shouldn’t we wait to see if this is a statistical aberration as the graph and most sources, suggest?

Then the editorial tells us that 31 of the London fatalities came from knife attacks and then draws this conclusion:

Second Amendment defenders who argue that murderous individuals will find ways to kill regardless of controls on firearms – the old “people, not guns, kill people” argument – often are belittled by liberals. But it is true, whether we want to admit it or not.

Yes, people do the killing, but I think that at least some liberals argue that it’s often a lot easier to kill with a gun rather than a knife. In this case, some of the London press point to an increase in gang violence as one of the reasons for the uptick in homicides. Just a thought -- wouldn’t there have been far more deaths had these gangs used guns instead of knives?

• This is apparently another one of the those one-size-fits-all, use-anywhere-in-the-Ogden-empire editorial. It cannot be found on Ogden’s Wheeling site but here it is on the Warren Times Observer (PA) site.