It’s never a good day when I learn there’s a mass shooting somewhere. It may be thousands of miles away, but each such event is a horrible reminder of what can happen on any given day.

It doesn’t help that on some level, I know that anti-gun activists will latch onto the killings and use the bodies of the deceased as a soapbox to push for more gun control.

However, in the case of Aurora, Illinois, it’s really a case of gun control failure.

Police said gunman … likely brought his .40-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun to work because he knew he was being fired from his job of 15 years. Martin, who was convicted in 1995 of aggravated assault, was not licensed to own or carry a gun.

That, however, only gives part of the story.

You see, the killer didn’t just pick up some black market gun or anything of the sort. While it says he wasn’t licensed to own or carry a gun, that wasn’t always the case.

Aurora investigators determined immediately after Friday’s killings of five people at a manufacturing firm that the shooter had worked there for 15 years. They soon learned he had caused the carnage with a handgun purchased from a local dealer in 2014. What’s now under question, as five families grieve and wounded police officers recuperate, is why the killer still had a gun he shouldn’t have possessed.

According to authorities, the man who fatally shot five employees of Henry Pratt Co. and wounded several officers Friday was a convicted felon. Gary Martin served time in prison in Mississippi in the 1990s for aggravated assault. Yet about a decade later, he was issued an Illinois firearm owner’s identification card and purchased a Smith & Wesson .40-caliber handgun.

In other words, the FOID we keep hearing about from anti-gunners, the one they swear will have some major impact on gun violence and prevent such atrocities, completely and totally failed to keep the gun out of the hands of a convicted felon.

That may not be the only failure of gun control in keeping this kind of thing from happening, either.

The Facebook page Illinois Gun Owners Rights posted this over the weekend.

That’s right. That’s a sticker that declares the business a gun free zone.

Not to be cold, but how did that work out for them?

While it’s possible this is a photoshop, the visible parts of the address match that of Henry Pratt Co. from their website, so I’m inclined to believe it’s accurate.

Yet again, despite a slew of gun laws and a few more under consideration by the state, absolutely nothing stopped this from happening. Yes, the shooter had his FOID revoked, but it seems no one bothered to actually do anything about his gun. At that point, removing his FOID accomplished jack squat, didn’t it?

How many times do we need to see these shootings happen in places with tighter gun control laws before anti-gunners get a clue? Gun control isn’t the answer and it never will be. You’re not going to stop these attacks no matter how much you infringe on the sacred liberty of ordinary Americans, so maybe it’s time to take a step back and look at other potential solutions.

Because FOIDs and red flag laws that also exist in the state did nothing. They did nothing at all.