New York City is the most gun controlled city in the nation. While it’s more Second Amendment-friendly than, say, the United Kingdom, it’s still a far cry from your more gun friendly states in the nation. Things are tightly restricted and they’re going to be for the foreseeable future. After all, the only gun law they’ve repealed in recent memory is one that barred people from taking guns out of the city, and they only repealed that in an attempt to stave off a Supreme Court decision.

Despite absolutely no attempt at actually liberalizing gun laws in the Big Apple, though, it seems so-called gun crimes are at a 25-year high.

In an interview with Pat Kiernan, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said 160 gun arrests were made across the five boroughs this past week, accounting for a 25-year high. Thirty seven arrests were made on Monday.

Shea attributed some of the spike in crime to a shift in budgetary resources away from the NYPD.

There could be a time “where we won’t be able be able to spend it on something else,” Shea said. “And we’re gonna have to pay for it.”

But, the police commissioner stressed there has to be “real consequences” for criminals who carry guns.

“It’s good that we got them off the street, but it’s bad that people are carrying them” in the first place, he said. “The mindset of the criminal is that there are no consequences.”

So much for the city’s gun laws preventing this kind of thing.

Oh, I’m sure some will argue that the arrests somehow prove gun laws there are working. Others will use the arrests to try and indict other states in the country for not having tougher gun laws or some such nonsense. Yet through it all, there will have to be the understanding that criminals were still getting guns no matter what the laws in New York City said.

That’s because criminals, by definition, do not follow the law. They tend to know when and where to get a gun without any kind of a background check. They know the black market for guns.

It doesn’t matter what other states do because if those states changed their laws right now, it would likely have zero impact on the flow of guns to criminal hands.

New York City’s gun control laws have been on the books for over a century. During that time, crime has risen and fallen, all without appreciably changes to the gun laws. The city has been among the most violent cities in the nation and among the most peaceful. If gun control worked as advertised, it would never be that violent to begin with.

No, violence and crime are far more complicated issues than that.

If the solution was as simplistic as gun control advocates like to make it out to be, New York wouldn’t be having these issues. Neither would Chicago, for that matter.

The fact that they are, however, illustrates a point we’ve been trying to make for some time. That point is that gun control doesn’t stop the criminals and it never has. Other factors have much more impact on them, but gun control does interfere with the law-abiding and their ability to defend themselves.

But anti-gun officials would rather not acknowledge any of that.