What differentiates assault weapons from these other firearms is not what they do, as a number of commentators have now pointed out. It is how they look — namely, very mean, just as a butcher knife may look more frightening than the average steak knife. Even if extending the ban would somehow totally eliminate all those already in existence — it wouldn't do any such thing — not much imagination would be required for the criminals who use them to switch to something else that works as well or better, as the vast majority of criminals already do.

The Times columnist — Nicholas Kristof — is particularly irksome and self-righteous in his insistence that President Bush will be responsible for killings if he does not press for an extension of the ban. Not only would this measure keep nary a soul alive, but it is somewhere between difficult and impossible to prove that any gun-control measure — there are hundreds in the land — has ever helped reduce crime. What's effective are such things as putting criminals in prisons for a long time and improving police-department performance.

In short, you must aim at stopping the criminal behavior, not taking steps that mostly make people search out different means of accomplishing their evil ends. To paraphrase a point that liberals love to mock but that makes sense, it's not butcher knives that kill people — it's those who wield the knives.

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Jay Ambrose is director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard Newspapers and can be reached at AmbroseJ@shns.com