In the United States, no firearm is as tightly controlled as machine guns. You have to get permission from law enforcement to buy one, then you pay a special tax, all to get a fully automatic weapon. It’s everything the gun control crowd could want. Especially since people can’t buy anything made after the 1987 machine gun ban, thus making the surviving weapons extremely expensive.

Based on the arguments of anti-Second Amendment types, this should mean no one is ever killed by a machine gun.

And yet, a Houston police officer was killed with one earlier this year, as the officer’s bodycam footage makes clear.

The Houston Police Department has released bodycam footage of the shootout that left one officer dead and another injured in September.

The footage, which is about 11 minutes long, shows how senior officer William “Bill” Jeffrey and Sgt. Michael Vance were shot while serving an arrest warrant to Deon Ledet.

The video shows Jeffrey and Vance identify themselves as officers multiple times while standing outside Ledet’s apartment in northeast Houston. His girlfriend answered the door, but Ledet refused to come out.

Within seconds, multiple shots were fired from inside the apartment and Jeffrey and Vance were hit.

“We need to get Bill out! We need to get Bill out of there!” another officer yelled after the shooting. Jeffrey died from his injuries.

Vance’s bodycam shows him crawling to escape the gunfire after he was shot. He is still recovering.

…

The video combines the bodycam footage from the six different officers who were on the scene. Before showing the video to the media, Chief Finner asked everyone to pay particular attention to the “rapid gunfire.”

Fred Milanowski, the special agent in charge of Houston’s ATF division, said Ledet was using a gun with an auto switch. That means he can use his semi-automatic weapon like a mini machine gun.

An auto switch, according to Milanowski, allowed Ledet to shoot a 30-round magazine in 2.6 seconds.

“There is absolutely no reason or no room for a suspect or suspects to be armed like this,” Finner said. “This is what we’re up against and we need to do something about it.”

Of course, auto switches are already illegal and full-auto weapons are as well.

According to the anti-Second Amendment argument, if you heavily restrict something, you don’t have things like this happen. However, we’ve heavily restricted machine guns and this still freaking happened!

What these people tend to forget is that criminals are ingenious.

More specifically, some criminals are ingenious. They will find all sorts of ways to do illegal things no matter what you throw up to stop them. We now have to sign in order to get certain allergy meds because some used the stuff to make meth, but since the rule went into effect, meth manufacturing has chugged along just fine, simply shifting to a different ingredient.

Guns are no different.

So maybe it’s time to recognize this fact and adjust fire. Instead of blaming guns–a policy some have pursued for decades with no positive results–maybe it’s time to start trying to address whatever it is that makes people become criminals in the first place?

A radical thought, I know, but maybe they should try it for a little while and just see.