Statistics furnished by the police department show startling facts. Citizens do not realize the number of persons who are either wounded or killed every year by shooting with the revolver. One can hardly pick up a metropolitan paper without finding an account of a shooting, either by accident or design. We have laws forbidding the carrying of concealed weapons, which are to a certain extent effective, but to a very small extent, because it is practically impossible to search every man on the street--and keep him searched. The law, no matter how rigidly enforced, can do but little substantial good. We must also consider other deadly weapons, such as dirk knives and brass knuckles. So far as these are concerned, they are manufactured solely to be used as instruments of crime. The brass knuckle is never used as a weapon of defense, but always as one of offense. The dirk knife has no use other than as a weapon to be used against human beings. It is not used either in war or for any domestic purpose. So far as the revolver is concerned, it has no proper use anywhere in the world. It is carried either as a weapon of offense or defense; but as a weapon of defense it is only possibly effective when there is a revolver in the hands of the antagonist. If he has none, none is needed for defense. An attack made upon a man at close quarters by the use of a sandbag or any other weapon in the hands cannot be met practically with a revolver. There is no time or opportunity for its use. The proposition is therefore sound that, if no one carried a pistol for offense, none would be needed for defense. Shotguns and rifles are used in hunting, but not the revolver. The ordinary revolver of commerce, the one which a man can carry concealed, has no use in modern warfare. There is no legitimate use anywhere for such a weapon. September, 1907, officials of the New York police department, acting under Commissioner Bingham's orders, took 5,000 revolvers out to sea beyond Sandy Hook and threw them overboard. The literary secretary of the commissioner said it reminded him of the Doges who used to wed the sea with rings. If the New York ceremony was not so richly symbolical it certainly was vastly more sensible. These revolvers were the results of eighteen months of police seizures. Some of them were automatic weapons in the $28 class, and others were of the common variety used by small boy initiates in crime. Together they were worth at least $15,000. Not so very long ago New York City held an auction sale every year just before the Fourth of July at which all confiscated weapons were sold. Thereby Fourth of July killings were made easy and cheap, and crime at all other times of the year was encouraged, for most of the weapons went to pawnbrokers and second-hand dealers, who put them back in the hands that would use them worst. The police have one instance of a revolver that to their knowledge came back into their possession four times in this way.