Fresno, California isn’t exactly Los Angeles or San Francisco. Granted, it’s not the tiniest of cities either, but it’s far from a massive metropolis that rivals New York or Chicago or anything.

Yet like most cities in this day and age, it’s having a problem with armed criminals.

In fact, it’s having such a problem that police there recently spoke about just how busy they’ve become.

As questions swirl about resident safety due to a surge in violent crime in Fresno over the past two years, Fresno’s top cop said nearly 200 dangerous criminals are off the streets.

Operation Safe Neighborhoods ran from November 1-7 and was a joint partnership between local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. In total there were over 100 felony arrests and over 80 misdemeanor arrests.

“These individuals arrested are for homicide, assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, and sexual assault,” said Balderrama about the felony arrests.

…

However, he said that an enormous number of guns being pulled off the streets by his department is a concern, with the department on track to recover over 2000 firearms this year.

“2000 guns,” said the Chief. “And keep in mind this is not a second amendment issue. These firearms, a lot of them are ghost guns, a lot of them are stolen, and they are all in the hands of people who should not have them.”

How is that possible?

I mean, California has such strict gun control laws–laws meant to prevent any of this kind of thing–that I thought this would be impossible.

“But they’re stolen guns!” someone will reply, to which I’ll respond with, “No duh.”

Of course they’re stolen guns. That’s what we’ve been telling you for years now. While the chief didn’t specify just how many were stolen and how many were “ghost guns,” I feel pretty safe in saying that maybe a couple hundred were so-called ghost guns while the majority of the rest were stolen.

And that’s why gun control fails every time. Criminals aren’t buying guns on the open market. They’re buying them from another criminal who isn’t conducting background checks.

It seems they just don’t follow universal background check laws. Shocking, I know!

Even with “ghost guns,” it should be remembered that even those are controlled in California. You can build a gun legally with a kit, but you’re required to put a serial number on it and register it with the state, thus making it something other than a “ghost gun.” Criminals, however, aren’t really interested in that sort of thing.

Again, shocking.

I don’t care how people try to spin it, this is really nothing more than additional evidence that California’s gun control laws simply do not work as advertised. If they did, I seriously doubt the Fresno police would have found anything close to 2,000 illegal guns of any type.

Unfortunately, few in power in California have any interest in actually recognizing those failures and then understanding just why that’s the case. They’d much rather believe the problem is that they don’t have enough laws.

They keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. There’s a word for that.