Anti-Second Amendment activists will swear up and down that it’s possible to keep guns out of the hands of at least most criminals. They just think we need more gun control laws on the books. It’s not a failure of anything, to hear them say it, other than our inability to pass their preferred legislation.

I mean, it’s not like drones could smuggle guns into our inner cities or anything, right?

Nope. We just need more gun control.

Well, Italy has a lot of gun control. More than most anti-Second Amendment activists say they’re interested in (at least for now). Additionally, prisons have even more control over guns. Or, at least, you’d think so.

But, well, in case you thought I pulled that whole drone thing out of my posterior…

An Italian prisoner has shot at fellow inmates through the bars of their cell with a weapon believed to have been smuggled in by drone.

The 28-year-old man, who has links to the Neapolitan mafia, fired three shots on Sunday at prisoners he had argued with, but without injuring them, said Donato Capece, the head of the Sappe prison union.

The man had got permission to leave his cell to have a shower, and once the door was open he pulled out the gun and pointed it at a guard, forcing him to hand over his keys to the other cells, Capece said.

Unable to open the cells of his enemies, the inmate shot through the bars instead.

The man then used an illegal mobile phone to call his lawyer, who advised him to turn his weapon over to the authorities in the high-security prison, about 60 miles (100km) south-east of the capital, Rome.

“We assume that the weapon arrived by drone,” Capece said.

Well.

That’s…creative.

Of course, if a gun-controlled nation can’t get guns out of a prison, what real hope is there of keeping guns out of the hands of gang members in our inner cities? They’re the ones committing most of the homicides, after all.

Look, this is a unique situation, I know. Not every prisoner is going to be able to get a gun dropped to him by drone. Hell, they can’t even get a cell phone dropped by drone in most cases–cell phones are controlled in many, if not all prisons–so I get that this isn’t something that will play out everywhere.

That’s not the point.

My point is that we have what should be among the most tightly controlled environment imaginable in a country that controls guns as a matter of course and the bad guy in prison still got a gun.

Criminals who want firearms will get firearms. One way or another, they’ll get them and they’ll use them. You’re never going to stop that from happening. It clearly didn’t happen in an Italian prison, so there’s no way it’ll happen on the streets of America.

Instead, activists would be more productive to try and work to keep people from pursuing a criminal lifestyle in the first place. Then they won’t seek out guns for illegal purposes.

Crazy idea, I know, but it’s got to work better than gun control has, right?