Every now and then, I like to stop and wonder if I’ve been wrong about my various opinions, even about guns. I find it to be a useful tool to keep me from ignoring some important bit of information or being locked into my beliefs without a good reason to be.

Obviously, I don’t think I’m right about everything, even with doing this. However, I can’t tell you what I may be getting wrong simply because I truly do my best to get it right.

On the subject of guns and gun control, though, it doesn’t take a lot of soul-searching to recognize the truth, that gun control doesn’t work.

Why?

Because we have stories like this all the time.

Three people are facing multiple felony charges in the South Bay for running a full-scale ghost gun operation.

The Santa Clara County District Attorney says it was being operated out of a million-dollar home in San Jose.

…

According to Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen, some of the weapons being made in San Jose’s Willow Glen Neighborhood were customized to be fully automatic machine guns.

“There we found an arsenal of dangerous ghost guns made by 3-D printers that were ready to be sold to criminals,” Rosen said.

Police seized more than 10 guns, loads of ammunition, 3-D printers, and suspected fentanyl.

The three suspects arrested are all convicted felons, who are part of a growing trend of building and selling guns to criminals.

No, this can’t be. It’s unpossible. San Jose just passed new gun control laws. There’s simply no way this could be happening there.

Except, it can.

And note, for a moment, these weren’t using kits. They were using 3D printers, which means no amount of regulation is ever going to stop this kind of thing from happening.

The receiver is the part of the gun considered a gun. The rest are basically just replacement parts that can’t be assembled into anything without a receiver. If you try to heavily restrict gun parts, you’re going to have a bad time because it means people cannot repair their own guns without jumping through hoops to get needed parts.

Of course, this is California, so that’s probably on the horizon, but it’s not really tenable either. After all, people can make those parts as well.

No part of a gun is so difficult to produce that it can’t be done in someone’s backyard shop if they have the right tooling. And that tooling isn’t nearly as difficult to acquire as some might believe.

For all the “anti-ghost gun” laws on the books in various places, the truth of the matter is that this particular genie is out of the bottle. The best strategy now is to recognize containing guns is off the table and start looking at other strategies that may yield some positive results.

Unfortunately, this is San Jose where they want to demand everyone have insurance for their guns when that insurance won’t actually do anything, so what can we really expect?