Thus says Kurt Vonnegut:

Since it was Mr. Metzger's wife I had shot, he had the power not only to make the police take it easy with me, but to persuade the whole town to more or less forgive me. This he did--in a very short statement which appeared on the front page of the Bugle-Observer, bordered in black, a day and a half after my moment of fatal carelessness:

"My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance; that something die.

"There is evil for you.

"We cannot get rid of mankind's fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true.

"I give you a holy word: DISARM."

-- "Deadeye Dick" by Kurt Vonnegut