Right now, Jersey City has once again put a spotlight on a gun control state playing host to a high-profile shooting. The senseless slaughter of four innocent people was motivated by hate and bigotry, something we should never tolerate. Yet the very policies we’ve routinely been told are the answer to the scourge fail to stop these attacks in states like New Jersey.

In fact, they fail to keep guns out of the hands of prohibited people in general.

A pawn shop owner with a criminal record was charged with illegal weapons possession in a probe that stemmed from Wednesday’s Jersey City hate crime killings, federal authorities said.

Ahmed A-Hady, 35, was busted by FBI agents early Saturday on a federal charge of being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm, said Newark federal prosecutors.

Investigators found a slip of paper in the pocket of hate killer [name redacted] that contained the partial phone number and address of A-Hady’s pawn shop in Keyport, N.J.

When investigators searched a safe in A-Hady’s shop on Friday, they found three handguns, says a complaint in Newark Federal Court.

Well, how about them apples?

Undoubtedly, someone will once again argue that the problem isn’t that New Jersey’s gun laws don’t work, but that they can’t make the rest of the nation bow down to the altar of gun control. After all, they’ll likely say, if bad guys couldn’t get guns in a different state, then they couldn’t bring them into New Jersey.

Of course, if that was true, the United Kingdom as a whole would be a gun-free Utopia. Not only do that have strict gun control laws, they also are an island. Access comes through controlled points of entry in most cases. The only access by car is through another country with strict gun control laws. In fact, gun control laws dominate the entire continent of Europe.

So, really, British bad guys can’t get guns, right?

Well, I wouldn’t put all your chips on that one.

This is the potentially lethal fire power of drugs gang operating in south Manchester.

Live ammunition, three revolvers, and a deactivated Glock handgun were seized by police.

The stash, which also included £16,000 in cash, scales, mixing agents, a kilogram of skunk cannabis, and a quarter kilo of cocaine, were hidden at addresses across the Chorlton dsitrict.

Of course, this is far from the first time I’ve talked about British police finding firearms. It happens semi-regularly, to be quite honest, and I don’t write about every report I learn of. It really depends on what else is happening in the news that day.

My point, though, is that if New Jersey’s troubles could only be the result of guns being imported from pro-gun states, then England wouldn’t have an issue. Yet they do.

The truth is, bad guys are going to get guns and you’re not going to stop them from doing so. They’ll continue to find ways to get guns regardless of what regulations you throw up. Instead, those laws are just going to keep law-abiding citizens from having the most efficient means to defend themselves currently available.

What are the odds that anyone in New Jersey–or England, for that matter–will grasp this concept?