While the anti-gun activists will routinely claim that gun control works, they’re often guilty of having to manipulate data to reach that conclusion. After all, it’s not like crime suddenly goes away just because people don’t have guns, now does it?

The worst of the worst still get firearms easily enough. In fact, the worse they are, the easier it seems for them to get guns.

Take the murder of an Irish journalist that took place last year. She was shot while covering a story and police just recently released the make of the gun used in the killing.

A gun found by police during searches in Londonderry last weekend has been identified as the weapon used to murder journalist Lyra McKee.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) confirmed the development after initial tests and an examination of the weapon, a Hammerli X-Esse pistol.

Ms McKee, 29, was shot during trouble in the city’s Creggan area in 2019.

The PSNI said Thursday’s announcement was “a significant moment for the investigation” into the New IRA murder.

The full forensic examination of the weapon will take some time to conclude.

The gun, along with a bomb, was found during planned police searches in the Ballymagroarty area of Derry.

Now, I’m pretty sure that part of Ireland has some strict laws about guns. After all, they’re technically part of Great Britain, so they’re governed by similar laws and we all know how those work for law-abiding citizens.

Yet the New Irish Republican Army, a terrorist group, was able to obtain a .22 lr handgun and use it to assassinate a journalist.

If gun laws are so great, then just how did that happen?

Of course, honest anti-gunners will admit that you’re never going to stop the flow of guns to criminal hands. Where we differ, though, is that they think that inhibiting law-abiding citizens from buying guns themselves is a worthy path to follow.

It’s not.

While it’s unlikely that Lyra McKee would have been armed herself, someone else might have been and been able to react before she was killed. Then again, we might not have. After all, guns have become so demonized that many won’t carry one even if they can.

Still, the gun laws in Northern Ireland did McKee absolutely no good. A New IRA thug was able to end her life in an instant despite all the myriad of laws on the books in that region. None of them did a damn thing to protect her.

That’s the problem, though. They never do.

Instead, they help the criminals by making sure they have unarmed prey on which to feed. It makes it so they can act with impunity knowing that none of the good people they threaten have the means to fight back. It’s the world they prefer.

And damned if our own breed of anti-gunners aren’t working to make it so we’ll all end up as vulnerable as Lyra McKee. If they get their way, it could be any one of us shot dead in the streets.