A lot of our readers take issue with the term “gun crime.” I get why, too. They’re crimes. The fact that they take place by someone using a gun doesn’t change the crime. “Gun crime” is a term the media made up to scare the population into supporting gun laws.

However, it’s also a really useful term for differentiating between different kinds of crime committed with different kinds of weapons. “Gun crime” is simply a useful term that everyone tends to understand, even those who oppose gun control on every level and with every fiber of their being.

And, it looks like the Department of Justice is cracking down on “gun crimes.”

Federal data suggests 2018 could be the Department of Justice’s busiest year ever in more than a decade for weapons prosecutions.

Should authorities keep up at the current pace, total annual prosecutions will exceed more than 10,000 this year — a 22.5 percent increase over 2017 and up by nearly half over the last five years, according to the Transactional Records Clearing House.

Weapons prosecutions peaked at 11,000 in 2004 and dropped to less than 7,000 a decade later. Since 2014, however, TRAC data shows a gradual uptick in prosecutions, punctuated by a steep increase this year as the DOJ cracks down on gun-related crimes.

This is largely the result of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his anti-crime task force. He’s been very focused on cracking down on violent crime as a whole, and this is the result.

Funny how prosecutions for gun-related crimes increase under an ostensibly pro-gun administration but were almost non-existent under an anti-gun administration. Why? Someone inclined to conspiracy theories might conclude that the Obama administration wanted more gun violence so it could justify further restrictions on our civil liberties. You know, if they were so inclined.

Kind of like allowing guns to flow into Mexico as part of an ATF operation, then complaining about how so many firearms showing up in Mexico came from the United States and how we need to do something about it.

Anyway, that’s the past and we’re dealing with the here and now.

The crimes being cracked down on are things like unlawful acts with a firearm and carjacking, but also include rulings on the illegal manufacture of a firearm. I know a lot of readers have an issue with that, but it’s the law, and I’ve stated before where I stand on that kind of thing.

Frankly, the increased enforcement is an overall good thing for all of us who do follow the law. After all, the people breaking these laws tend to break others as well, so pulling these people off the streets is a net win for good and decent people everywhere.

Sessions has put a lot of resources into hitting these criminals hard. This is also a win for gun rights activists from a political standpoint. If the violent criminals are off the streets, there’s less violent crime with no new gun laws, thus providing evidence that the solutions to violent crime don’t necessitate more gun laws, that what we have now is more than enough.