While anti-gunners often decry the lack of gun control, the truth is that guns actually are controlled. They shouldn’t be, in my humble opinion, but they are. They’re just not controlled as much as some would like.

However, California has made something of an art over adding layers and layers of gun control in such a way that they make it difficult to be a gun owner but haven’t been formally smacked down for it by the Supreme Court.

Yet.

One kind of gun that’s heavily regulated pretty much everywhere, though, are machine guns. Fully-automatic weapons are heavily restricted and there’s only a finite supply of legal machine guns available anyway.

Another thing that’s tightly controlled are drugs.

What does all of this have to do with one another? Oh, a California man facing some interesting charges.

A U.S. citizen living in Tijuana is expected to be arraigned Tuesday in Los Angeles on multiple federal charges for allegedly trading heroin and fentanyl for machine guns and explosives.

Pedro Roberto Hernandez-Gomez, 31, was charged Jan. 21 in Los Angeles federal court with possession of machine guns, attempt to transport explosives, being a felon in possession of firearms, distribution of heroin and distribution of fentanyl, according to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

In December, Hernandez-Gomez allegedly agreed to provide heroin and fentanyl in exchange for various machine guns, grenade launchers, grenades and handguns during what he believed were negotiations with traffickers but was, in fact, an ATF sting operation.

There’s literally nothing about this story that doesn’t sound like something out of a cop movie.

However, the reality is something different entirely. While Hernandez-Gomez was captured and is now facing criminal charges, we’re left wondering just how many people have made trades just like this and gotten away with it. How many times has he gotten away with it (allegedly)?

Oh, it’s easy for anti-gunners to look at this and think this somehow proves gun control works, but nothing is further from the truth. Any good cop will tell you that there’s only so many of these people you can actually catch. What you try to do is catch as many as you can to scare off the rest. A lot of criminals get away with a lot before they’re ever arrested.

If Hernandez-Gomez is guilty of this, it’s unlike it was his first time doing this. If it was, though, that just means that someone else is likely to do this a dozen or more time before ever being captured.

Guns are still flowing to places that gun control is supposed to prevent them from going.

The truth is that gun control can’t stop that flow. It simply is unable to prevent criminals from doing illegal things. What it’s great at doing, though, is making it so the law-abiding can’t do something. It keeps full-auto firearms out of the hands of people like you and me who would never misuse them for anything but would really like to take them to the range for a bit of fun.

You’ll never restrict something so sufficiently that criminals can’t get it. All you can do is interfere with the lawful man or woman and treat them like a criminal instead.