How to not allow comments

I’m brand new to this, PHP, CSS and to 2.0. I’ve chosen Andreas 09 theme and have it loaded. The blog audience is very unsophisticed about blogging and the Internet and as this is an announcements blog I want them to only e-mail me comments.

Do I change something in the page template so it doesn’t recognize the Comments template? Do I just comment out all the Comments template? Would I do the same thing to negate the Blogroll section?