Critics of so-called ghost guns–any gun without a serial number including those you build yourself–take issue with the fact that literally anyone can order a kit and build a gun. They want people to have to get a background check before obtaining a firearm in every single case.

That’s not realistic, of course, and we all know why. Criminals will continue to obtain guns no matter what you do. Making it harder for law-abiding people to obtain them. It won’t really have an impact on bad guys.

But some don’t see it that way. They think “ghost guns” are somehow a special problem they can make just go away. They latch onto every story of such weapons as evidence they need to do something.

They’re going to love this one.

He ordered everything he needed online to make guns, including semi-automatic weapons. Then, the 13-year-old boy sold them on the streets to others, Douglas County Sheriff Tim Pounds said Wednesday.

But when a man tried to take a gun without paying for it, the teenager fired a shot with one of his homemade weapons, Pounds said. The shot killed the boy’s 14-year-old sister, Kyra Scott, described as a “beautiful, kind soul.”

“A 13-year-old kid, doesn’t weigh but about 80 pounds, was able to make a weapon from start to finish,” Pounds said. “At 13 years old.”

…

From there, the investigation turned to the family’s home and what was going on inside. Pounds said investigators soon learned of the 13-year-old’s gun-making, something the sheriff said he had never seen.

“Never in my entire career,” Pounds said. “Never heard of that.”

The “ghost guns” are particularly troubling to law enforcement because they don’t have serial numbers and can’t be tracked, the sheriff’s office said.

Obviously, some are going to point to this and argue this is proof that these kinds of weapons are especially problematic.

I don’t see it that way.

What I’m seeing is a case of parents who clearly weren’t paying much attention to their children.

This kid was building guns for sale on the streets. That means he was ordering the parts online, paying for them with a credit or debit card, having them shipped to his house since it’s unlikely he could get a P.O. box, obtaining the tooling somehow–these aren’t Lego, after all–building them, selling them, then doing something with the money so he could build more of these guns.

How would even moderately involved parents miss this?

I mean, some of this should have been pretty hard to hide, especially the packages and money. I mean, I can see a kid knowing how to hide his browser history so Mom and Dad don’t know what he’s up to, assuming he didn’t use an incognito mode in the first place. Many parents aren’t going to sit there with their kids the whole time they’re online.

But how do you hide the money going out or coming in? How do you hide the packages coming into the house or the kid spending time out in the garage or the tool noises coming from his room?

Honestly, I don’t see how parents could miss this. I mean, maybe the kid was smart and figured out how to bypass all of this somehow, but I’m skeptical.

This horrible tragedy isn’t the result of insufficient laws. It looks like the result of insufficient parenting.