The Philadelphia Inquirer's April Saul is a tireless promoter of "gun violence" theory. For many months, she has been writing a series called "Kids, Guns, and a Deadly Toll," which focuses on child victims of what is called "gun violence." According to this theory, when someone is shot to death, the guns are the primary culprit, but when the shooting victim is aged 3 to 17, the guns are even more guilty of violence. Along with today's huge front page story, there's an accompanying piece in which she explains why concepts like "guilty" and "innocent" are only a secondary consideration:

I began to believe that if gun violence was ever to be addressed, we had to see faces, not just numbers on charts and graphs.

I decided that my columns would not try to distinguish between the "guilty" and the "innocent" or - as my colleagues worried - make delinquents out to be saints.

These victims were all children.

They all had mothers.

They didn't deserve to die in the streets of Philadelphia.

Still (as I've tried to explain countless times), I have a problem with the phrase "gun violence," as it changes the focus from the heinous nature of the crime to an object which is not guilty in itself, unless you believe guns are guilty of an evil animus.

It is one thing to not distinguish between the guilty and the innocent in the case of a victim. However, in the case of the killer, it makes no sense at all, and that's my objection to shifting the focus from the criminal to the tool he uses.

Much as I try to understand the other side of this argument, I am unable to understand how a gun can be guiltier than a knife, a baseball bat, or a car.

If we look at this logically, a bad person has to use the thing to commit a bad act. The thing is not bad in and of itself, but we are asked to believe that guns are. I don't think I've ever attempted to follow this reasoning out literally, so I decided that for once I am going to try.

I'll assume for the sake of argument that guns commit gun violence.

OK, so what is gun violence? Does the gun have to actually be fired? Suppose a criminal uses it to beat his victim to death. That's called "pistol whipping," and many people have been killed that way. Surely, pistol whippings are part of gun violence, aren't they? If I am wrong and if a gun bludgeoning someone is not gun violence, can anyone tell me why it isn't? Does the gun have to be used exactly as it is designed? Would we say the same thing about a car being used to run someone over? Suppose a car thief bent on murder ran out of gas while he attempted to ram the car into his victim, yet because the victim was downhill, he still managed to deliberately plow the car into the guy and kill him. I don't see much difference between that and a criminal discovering beating someone to death with his gun, and I'm not sure it would make much difference whether the gun misfired, wasn't loaded, jammed, or he just didn't want witnesses to hear the gunfire.

And what about suicides? For reasons not clear to me, the author of today's piece doesn't seem to include suicide by guns as "gun violence." It's not as if she didn't know that guns are often used to commit suicide.

In fact, in another piece the same author covers the tragic suicide of a 16 year old in the Philadelphia suburbs. The kid used a Kalashnikov to shoot himself at his school. It seems he was quite familiar with guns, and had no intention of shooting anyone but himself, but suppose he had. Why would it only be called "gun violence" if it was directed against others? Unless suicide is inherently nonviolent I'm at a loss to understand why he wasn't listed among April Saul's victims of gun violence.

Apparently, April Saul only considers gun violence to be gunfire directed against a person other than the shooter. But what about the police? Do they commit gun violence when they shoot suspects? How about self defense?

I don't mean to be facetious here, because according to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, suicides, accidental deaths, and justifiable homicides are all part and parcel of what is called "gun violence."

Unless the term is one of those flexible, meaningless code phrases which varies depending on who's using it, the teen suicide should have been included among April Saul's list of victims.

So why wasn't he?

Lastly, I'm also curious about the connection Ms. Saul seems to be attempting to draw in today's piece between guns and civil rights. It's not just a passing reference, but she thinks it's important enough to be her final point in the two concluding paragraphs:

The first time I heard "We Shall Overcome" was more than 40 years ago. Three civil-rights workers had just been killed in Mississippi; my New Jersey community was hosting a group of Southern black teenagers who needed to get away until things cooled down. I was a spoiled suburban kid, but I'll never forget standing in a circle, holding hands with them, and singing that song.

The last time I heard it was at the burial of little Casha'e Rivers, just before her body was placed in the ground.

Again, am I missing something?

Isn't the singing of "We Shall Overcome" at two funerals 40 years apart just a coincidence? Or am I completely dense and missing the point? Maybe I am, but if I am missing the point, what point?

What do the three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi and a girl murdered this year in Philadelphia have in common? Other than the fact that they were murdered, and the same song was sung at their funerals, it's a stretch, but I'll try to understand.

I'm pretty sure that the three civil rights workers would have been Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman -- all of whom were shot to death by the Ku Klux Klan. I remember it too, as I was only ten. It was a horrifying event which helped galvanize the nation.

The thing is, I don't remember anyone at the time blaming the guns. It was a classic case of institutionalized racism, and while Klansmen and bigoted local sheriff employees were convicted (only after a great deal of trouble and after which they were insufficiently punished), in all these years I have never heard anyone -- anywhere -- blame the guns they used.

I don't mean to minimize the tragedy of the murders of Casha'e Rivers or any other child shooting victim. But I do think the nature of the murder of civil rights workers is morally more heinous. I don't see how lumping them together as "gun violence" is in any way helpful. It minimizes the horror of murder.

Is it possible that Ms. Saul considers gun violence to be a civil rights issue? A form of institutionalized racism? How is that to be squared with the use of "gun violence" to refer to murders committed by people with guns? If the victims and the shooters are of the same race, how is it logical to say that race is implicated? Even if black people are killed by other black people in disproportionate numbers, unless it could be shown that they were killed because they were black, is it fair or logical to compare these killings to the murder of civil rights workers?

I mean, how far do we take this animus thing? It's bad enough that guns are blamed for the violence people commit with them, but we're now supposed to impute racism and civil rights violations to them too?

Well, I was naive enough to promise I'd follow this thing out (and "assume for the sake of argument that guns commit gun violence"), so I guess I must.

Logic sometimes has consequences, however painful.

If gun violence is to be seen as racist, then I suppose the "hate crime" approach must be followed. That might mean that the guns would be guilty of hate crimes even if their owners wouldn't be, but I suppose that's because of the disparate impact or something.

But surely all guns are not to blame for the actions of some guns, are they? That wouldn't be fair.

Considering the orchestrated attempt by some to call opposition to gun control racism, I think a compromise is called for, so I'd like to present a modest proposal. What I suggest is that if guns are responsible for committing violence as well as hate crimes, perhaps we might all live with the approach of putting each accused gun on trial.

Card-carrying NRA desperado that I am, I might just have to allow myself to live with the idea that any gun that is found to have committed any act of "gun violence" should be destroyed. And if it turns out to have committed any form of gun hate crime (even if defined by the "disparate impact" standard), I'm even willing to allow that the severest possible penalty be imposed. Because these are guns and not people, even though they have an animus I'd be willing to support, well, the death penalty. Take all guns found guilty of gun violence and crush or melt them. If they can be shown to be hateful as well as violent, then increase the penalty somehow. How? Maybe by slowly dissolving them in acid? I'm open to possibilities.

So how about it, folks?

Zero tolerance for violent guns, and less than zero tolerance for any gun that hates!