Many anti-gunners will claim that if you have certain laws in place, it will somehow stop bad people from doing bad things. They might even honestly believe that to be the case. Those are also the ones who genuinely believe they don’t want a total gun ban…they’re just going to push for one more gun control law until some Utopia comes about.

However, the problem with this is that there will always be bad actors in the United States. Some people will do illegal things for various reasons, up to and including because it can make them a lot of money.

That includes firearm sales. Take this case from Kansas City, Missouri as an example.

A former Kansas City, Missouri, fire captain pleaded guilty to illegally selling guns over a five-year period that included selling to convicted felons, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri announced Monday.

James Samuels, 54, admitted to buying 77 guns from November 2013 to August 2018, most of which were hand guns.

Samuels sold 47 of the firearms to third parties, and 10 to 20 of those went to convicted felons.

…

He also made several false statements to federally licensed firearm dealers dealers by misrepresenting the identity of the actual buyer of firearms, according to the attorney’s office.

In other words, he intentionally provided firearms to criminals.

Please, tell me precisely what laws would have actually stopped this from happening? He pled guilty to basically being a straw buyers for felons, which means he was the key to evading the NICS check system, so universal background checks wouldn’t have done a thing to stop these transactions.

Nor would one of the preferred methods for dealing with straw buys, namely gun rationing. Samuels bought guns over a 57 month period. Unless someone was limited to just one gun per month, he could have still purchased every firearm we know he sold to third parties. So, not a thing would have been accomplished except to penalize people who weren’t doing anything wrong.

At the end of the day, there’s nothing you’re going to do to stop criminals from getting guns. You might make it a bit tougher for them, but they’ll still get guns if they want them badly enough.

But those laws will invariably interfere with the rights of law-abiding Americans. It’ll keep them from buying the guns they want despite the fact that they represent zero threat to anyone. These are people you could hand a rocket launcher and they wouldn’t hurt a soul. Meanwhile, felons will still be able beat someone to death.

Maybe it’s me, but disempowering those who aren’t inclined to do evil while doing nothing to actually stop those who would do evil is kind of the big reason why gun control is a colossal failure and always will be.

Criminals don’t follow the law. They’ll do whatever they have to do to circumvent the laws, as we can see here. And honestly, who would look at a fire department captain as someone who would provide criminals with guns? I sure wouldn’t have.

And that’s the problem.