A high level of emotion is only natural in the wake of a crime as horrible as the murder of Police Officer Dillon Stewart, but there’s no reason to throw all logic out the window. Yet that’s what is entailed in the calls resounding through the city for tougher gun laws in the wake of the fatal shooting. A news article in yesterday’s Daily News bemoans the “languishing” in Congress of bills to ban .50 caliber sniper rifles, “military-style assault weapons,” and “guns that fire bullets that penetrate soft body armor.” Yet Stewart wasn’t killed with a .50 caliber sniper rifle or a “military-style assault weapon.” And the bullet that killed him didn’t “penetrate” his body armor – it went through the arm hole.

Mayor Bloomberg said Wednesday, “What we need is national legislation to stop this craziness.” But it’s already illegal to murder a policeman. The criminals who do such things aren’t stopped by laws. Even the New York Times, in an editorial yesterday predictably calling for more federal laws against gun trafficking, acknowledged, “The gun that killed Officer Stewart was stolen in Florida, and it is hard to say whether stronger laws would have kept it off the streets of New York.”

Hard indeed. “Following The Gun: Enforcing Federal Laws Against Firearms Traffickers,” a report issued in June of 2000 by the Clinton administration’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, points out that there are already 29 separate federal statutes on the books related to firearms trafficking. It takes five pages of the report merely to list them all in a thumbnail summary. One might call for stricter judges and tougher sentences for those convicted of violating the existing laws, but then one risks running afoul of the selfsame liberal activists who are in the vanguard of the gun control movement.

The mayor claimed “we have more guns in America than we have people,” but he’s either exaggerating or he has his facts wrong. Even the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence claims on its Web site there are 193 million guns in America, while the National Rife Association claims a higher figure. But even the NRA’s number is less than the Census Bureau’s estimate of the national population, 297 million. And as the NRA points out, while gun ownership has soared, violent crime is at a 30-year low – even after years of a Congress controlled by gun-friendly Republicans.

Even our friends at the usually sensible New York Post have gotten on the antigun bandwagon, launching a crusade against what the paper has, with its characteristic liveliness, dubbed “The Gun Menace.” With all those guns in the hands of law-abiding Americans, there were just 9,326 murders in the whole country in 2004 that involved firearms. Each one is a tragedy, but with 200 million guns in the country and 9,326 gun-related murders in 2004, according to the FBI, that’s about a 0.005% chance that a gun will be used in a murder. Just by way of comparison, there were 42,884 people killed in motor vehicle accidents in America in 2003, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and about 231 million registered motor vehicles. Cars, trucks, and motorcycles, in other words, are about as prevalent as guns, but four times as deadly.

Now, we maintain a profound respect for the views of our law enforcement officials – police officers and prosecutors – who are warning of the dangers presented by the ease with which criminals can obtain guns. We’re all for getting tough on criminals, as Mayor Bloomberg has in his policing and criminal justice policies, with terrific results in terms of the reduction in crime. We’d be happy to see the street crimes unit brought back into action. But a moment like this, when the city is in high emotion over the killing of a uniformed officer, is precisely the moment to keep a cool head in respect of the logic. The criminals, not the guns themselves, are the real menace.