Every time there’s a mass shooting, a broken record kicks into gear. We hear the same things over and over again, particularly from the anti-gun left. They screech about how we need to “do something,” where that “something” is almost always gun control. They get outraged over any solutions that don’t cut at the average American’s sacred right to keep and bear arms.

Time and time again, the gun grabbers start grabbing for guns, but, as the Washington Examiner notes, gun control doesn’t work.

Once again, too, there were those whose contribution to debate was to sneer at people who offered prayers for the victims and their families, instead of advocating or promising gun control. Even if you set aside the sneers, there is a problem with their attitude, no matter how good their intentions are otherwise. Prayer might actually help. Gun control, on the other hand, doesn’t work and can’t work in the U.S. and is a fantasy now just as it ever was.

By “fantasy,” we mean to express several important facts that are ignored in this debate. It is fantasy as policy because stricter gun control, within the limits of what is considered reasonable today (i.e., anything short of a total ban on sales or even gun confiscation), does not guarantee or even statistically correlate with lower gun homicide rates in any given state. This fact merits your time for some research, but to give just one prominent example from the FBI data, Texas and California have comparable gun homicide rates each year (they were actually tied in 2015). If gun control were effective, that is not what you’d expect in the nation’s two most populous states with two of the most different gun policies. And that is by no means the only observation of its kind that you’ll take away from the FBI’s annual numbers.

Gun control is a political fantasy because the Second Amendment and various states’ constitutions protect the right to bear arms. This will not be changed, full stop. You don’t need to support or even like the Bill of Rights to see that gun control is an administrative fantasy as well. In a country where private citizens own more than 300 million firearms, no effective form of gun control can be practical, and no practical form can be effective. Even an obviously unconstitutional ban on all new sales would take a century to make its effects felt. Universal confiscation of hundreds of millions of firearms would be several orders of magnitude more difficult than deporting every illegal immigrant in the U.S.

Gun control advocates seem frustrated that this country is not and cannot ever be Luxembourg. But the sooner they accept that reality, the closer everyone will be to starting a productive conversation about how to prevent the next Parkland.

I’m sure I speak for most of you when I say that I couldn’t agree more.

Gun control is one of those things that sounds great if you look on the surface with no outside context. However, the reality that we’ve seen time and time again is that it only impacts the law-abiding. Criminals and terrorists can, and will, continue to get their hands on firearms, but the law-abiding citizen will not. If you can’t see why this is a problem, you’re either willfully obtuse or a semi-functional moron.

The fact is, though, as good as the Washington Examiner‘s post is, no single post will ever fully address all the reasons gun control will fail. Time and time again, we’ve seen these failures, and that’s why so many of us refuse to give up our sacred, protected rights.