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The state of Minnesota just passed two anti-gun bills. One is a red flag law, and the other is a universal background check bill. Neither are particularly revolutionary. We’ve seen them pop up in state after state so far.

What gets me this time, though, are some of the arguments being made.

First, is what motivated at least one member of the anti-gun side to back these bills.

After 17 people were killed in the Parkland, Florida shooting last year, Martha Wheeler decided that was enough.

“Even as a teacher when we were doing shooter drills, it just didn’t seem like the right thing to be doing, to be traumatizing little kids with shooting drills,” Wheeler said.

It led her to become a volunteer at Moorhead’s chapter of Minnesota Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense, a group that’s hoping two new gun control bills will get passed soon.

“If the laws that we have in place were enough, we wouldn’t have a record number of people dying by gun violence.”

Apparently, Wheeler has never heard about enforcement of gun laws.

You can have all the laws in the world, but unless they’re implemented and enforced correctly, they’re not worth the paper they’re printed on. We have plenty of gun laws on the books, tons of them. They don’t prevent acts of violence.

Take a look at California. By anti-gun reasoning, they should be a peaceful Utopia, a land of milk and honey where the only gun violence taking place is staged by Hollywood.

But it’s not.

Instead, there’s plenty of brutality as criminals keep getting guns and the law-abiding citizen is powerless to do anything about it.

At least someone on the pro-gun side understands this reality.

Republican State Rep. Matt Grossell is on the committee and voted against both bills.

As a former Police Chief of Blackduck and a Clearwater County Deputy, he says they just won’t work.

“No matter how many restrictions we put on gun ownership and gun purchasing, it’s not going to stop getting their firearms. They’ll continue to steal firearms. They’ll continue to receive firearms in illegal ways,” he said.

Yep. By definition, they’re criminals. They’re not going to follow the law.

If laws were so effective, why not just ban murder.

What’s that? We have, and yet it still happens? Shocking!

Look, I get the fear. I understand the outrage and anger that these things keep happening. Yet let’s face facts. Time and time again, we see the system in place failing to stop the bad people from doing bad things.

The Charleston killer in 2014 was pending a felony charge but got through because the background check system wasn’t efficient.

The Aurora killer earlier this year was a convicted felon whose name didn’t turn up in a background check. Two of them.

The Sutherland Springs killer was a dishonorably discharged veteran who also managed to get through a background check.

The Parkland killer wasn’t stopped because the sheriff’s department declined to arrest him on any of the more than 40 calls they answered at his home.

Over and over again, we can show precisely how the system failed. So why are more gun laws going to make us safer again?