Last week, Oregon passed Measure 114. The reason, proponents claim, was to prevent violent crimes carried out with firearms.

Among the many things in the law included a permit-to-purchase requirement, one meant to make sure only the law-abiding can buy a gun, even if they’re not buying from a gun store’s inventory.

I wonder how something like that would prevent an incident like this:

At around 3:10 a.m., police responded to an alarm call at the Eagle Gun Range, located in the 5900 block of West 159th Street.

Upon arrival, police said they located a stolen vehicle that had been used to ram the building to gain entry.

Police say 23 firearms were taken, though no specifics have been given as to just what those consisted of.

And the worst part? They didn’t even conduct a NICS check before taking off with the guns.

The horror.

Look, I get where proponents of universal background checks and permit-to-purchase requirements are coming from. I can see what they’re thinking when they opt to back these measures.

I can also see what they can’t.

For example, stolen guns are always going to be a thing.  Gun stores will also be a thing for as long as guns are lawfully available. That means gun store thefts are going to be a thing, since that’s a target with a high likelihood of, you know, having guns.

Criminals then take the guns and sell them to their buddies. They make some cash, their buddies get guns, and then the crimes committed are used to justify still more gun control.

It’s a vicious cycle and the anti-gun side of the debate either can’t see it or willfully refuses to see it. Either is a possibility, though I’m leaning toward the latter just this moment.

You’re never going to keep guns out of criminal hands. They’ll find a way to get guns no matter what you do. The UK can’t keep them out of criminals’ hands despite massive gun control efforts and being a freaking island with easier-to-control points of entry, so what hope does the US actually have?

So the answer isn’t gun control.

The answer, then is clearly something else, part of which is getting out of the way of law-abiding citizens who want to own a gun for whatever reason or no reason at all. Stop treating us like the problem when we already know that it’s a tiny segment of any population that’s the real issue.

Unless you actually address that portion of the population, you’re not going to make a dent in any kind of violent crime rates.

More restrictions just mean fewer law-abiding citizens carrying guns.

Meanwhile, criminals will ram into the front of a gun store and steal as many guns as they can in the few minutes they have before hauling butt out of there.

I’d like to say we should be smarter about where we focus our attention, but that would require assuming that gun control advocates are actually concerned about public safety and not disarming folks like you and me.