Some locales aren’t fans of homebuilt firearms. They think the idea of hobbyists building guns is somehow equivalent to arming legions of violent felons, and they want something done about it.

Once such place is the city of Bridgeport, Conn.

For what it’s worth, Guns.com reports that this isn’t a spur of the moment decision, either.

In a move advocated by Mayor Joseph Ganim as far back as March, lawmakers in the state’s largest city passed ordinance 155-17 last month to regulate “ghost guns,” defined as home-built firearms without serial numbers.

“This is a piece of metal that you can easily buy in the markets,” said Bridgeport Police Chief AJ Perez in a press conference, holding up an unfinished 80-percent AR lower. “But if you can get this, you can make this,” he said, holding an AR-15 short-barreled rifle. “And this is a real weapon. This weapon will discharge anywhere from 50 to 30 rounds at a time.”

Alright, first of all, it won’t “discharge anywhere from 50 to 30 rounds at a time.” Even if it’s fully-automatic–an act that’s already illegal without proper authorization–it still only fires one round at a time. It just fires one after another very quickly.

Be that as it may, automatic weapons are already tightly restricted. If someone builds a “ghost gun” and makes it full-auto, then they’ve already broken the law. The same is true if they create a short-barreled rifle without authorization or a weapon that’s too short in overall length. Those are already illegal.

But if people are doing that, what makes anyone believe that one more law will change things?

For now, those hunks of metal that are only partially completed receivers are still legal outside of Bridgeport. If Connecticut ends up banning them, there’s the rest of the country where they are still legal. Only a fool will believe they can actually stop these things from coming in.

Hell, even if there was a national ban, these guns would still be built.

The difference is that if there’s a national ban, only the bad guys would be building them. If that happens, there’s absolutely no reason for anyone to do anything other than build select-fire weapons. If they’re already going to go to jail for building them, why not?

At that point, though, the people who do build them aren’t going to be your law-abiding citizen, as a general rule. A far higher percentage will be criminals looking to circumvent the gun laws, and like it or not, they’re going to keep on bypassing gun control regulations. It’s almost like criminals don’t follow the law.

Shocking, I know, but that seems to be the case.

What a world we live in when you can’t trust criminals to follow the law. Tsk, tsk.

None of that gets into the fact that this ban will also turn lawfully owned firearms into illegal weapons overnight. Anyone in Bridgeport who built a gun in full compliance with the law will suddenly find it banned, with no compensation for getting rid of it.

But it’s not like gun owners are actually people to folks like this, either.