Europe has some pretty strict gun control that’s forced upon them by the European Union, though all member nations pretty much had it before the EU tried to flex its muscle on the issue. It seems Europe has never particularly been enamored with private firearm ownership. It probably stems from its history of an aristocracy that preferred its peasants disarmed to try and prevent revolt.

For Americans, none of that makes sense, but Europeans seem to take it in stride. Better them than us, I say.

Despite all that gun control, evil people in Europe don’t seem to have too much difficulty getting their hands on weapons that they’re not supposed to have. And that doesn’t just mean guns.

A neo-Nazi group in northern Italy had sent members to fight alongside Russia-backed separatists in the Donbass region of Ukraine. Apparently, the group brought some things back from their adventures—including a French-made air-to-air missile that somehow found its way from Qatar into the home of a neo-fascist extremist.

The missile and an assortment of other weapons were discovered in the latest of a series of raids by Italian federal police from the General Investigations and Special Operations Division (DIGOS). The raids are part of an ongoing investigation into the Forza Nuova political party and Rebel Firm extremist groups that had fought in the Donbass region.

…

Just how a French-built Qatari missile found its way into the collection of a group of neo-fascists in the Italian Piedmont region is not clear. But Forza Nuevo has supported the Syrian government, and one of those arrested in the raid—Fabio Del Bergiolo, 50, who ran for the Italian Senate in 2001 as a Forza Nuova candidate—is a former customs anti-fraud inspector. Del Bergiolo was apparently attempting to sell the missile for 470,000 Euros to “a foreign government official,” according to police.

The missile didn’t have an explosive warhead, thankfully.

That said, can we all agree that if a group of militants can get its hands on a freaking missile, then maybe gun control isn’t likely to stop the bad guys from getting guns?

To be sure, this group also had a plethora of firearms recovered in the raid, including a submachine gun. That, coupled with the suppressors also recovered at the scene, suggests these guys have stuff that even we Americans have a hard time getting our paws on. Then again, most of us don’t get our hands on missiles, either.

What happened here is simple. Organizations that don’t follow the law can find a lot of ways to smuggle things into the country. Drugs have made it into every western nation, so why would weapons be any different?

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that anti-gun activists and politicians will get the lesson here. They won’t see that disarming the American public won’t disarm the segments of the population who you’d most prefer to be disarmed. Criminals and criminal groups will still get guns, just like they get so many other things they’re not legally supposed to have. None of that will change.

All that will change is the average American citizen’s ability to meet the threat.