It seems like the term “gun trafficking” has become one of the more popular buzzwords in recent years. Everywhere and everything is about gun trafficking.

However, it happens. It’s a real thing and yes, it’s fairly common.

Gun control laws are supposed to prevent it, too. Especially in places like California where they seem to think all their violence issues can be solved with gun control.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work.

The San Mateo Sheriff’s office announced Thursday that 30 illegal firearms were seized and four people were arrested after a three-month investigation conducted with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the San Francisco Police Department and the San Francisco Drug Enforcement Administration Metro Task Force.

The investigation uncovered the trafficking and sales of firearms brought in from Arizona, according to the Sheriff’s office.

Police recovered homemade firearms (so-called ghost guns), serialized firearms, so-called high capacity magazines, and a wide variety of ammunition.

In other words, California’s gun control laws–the most expansive and strict in the nation–did jack squat to prevent.

Worse, I can make the argument that the laws facilitated such trafficking.

After all, when you heavily restrict an item, you don’t eliminate the market for it. What you do is incentivize less scrupulous people to procure that item for a profit. We’ve seen it with pretty much every prohibition you care to name.

That’s especially true with something like firearms.

Look, you can restrict things as much as you want, but you’re not going to make them go away. Like I said, you just create an incentive for some bad people to supply them to other bad people.

What you do manage to accomplish, however, is depriving the law-abiding citizens who did nothing wrong and represent no threat to anyone from possessing these items.

Gun trafficking is going to happen. That’s because there will always be a demand for it, particularly among criminals.

Your universal background checks, your permit to purchase laws, none of those accomplish a damn thing except to impact the people who weren’t a problem in the first place.

If you want to know why gun trafficking is a thing in this country, it’s not because there aren’t enough gun control laws. It’s because there are just too damn many.

But California is going to ignore this and keep pushing through gun control laws, then using the wreckage of that law to justify still more gun control. This is the natural order of the anti-Second Amendment types who neither understand nor care to understand the actual outcome of the laws they demand.

We do.

We understand and we oppose these laws.

Do you know who seems to like these laws, though? The criminals who will eventually profit from them. They’ll make a fortune because of these laws. They know it and we know it. Everyone should know it.

And yet, these laws still keep coming up.

There are better ways to combat gun trafficking, mostly by reducing the potential market for those illicit firearms through programs that pull people out of the criminal lifestyle and into being productive citizens.