sum two columns in R

Question

I feel a bit embarrassed as I am trying to add two columns in R to get the product.

I have tried

sum(col1,col2)

but this returns

Answer 1

tablename$column3=rowSums(cbind(tablename$column1,tablename$column2),na.rm=TRUE)

This can be used to ignore blank values in the excel sheet.
I have used for Euro stat dataset.

This example works in R:

crime_stat_data$All_theft <-rowSums(cbind(crime_stat_data$Theft,crime_stat_data$Theft_of_a_motorised_land_vehicle, crime_stat_data$Burglary, crime_stat_data$Burglary_of_private_residential_premises), na.rm=TRUE)