While some people like to pretend that we have virtually no gun control laws in this country. We do, of course, and some weapons are virtually unobtainable through lawful means. I’m talking, of course, about machine guns.

Full-auto weapons are tightly controlled and due to the nature of those controls, they’re priced so ridiculously high that most people will never be able to afford one.

But the bad guys seem to get them easily enough these days.

Police charged a 24-year-old Brookline last week after they found several machine guns in his car during a traffic stop last month, federal authorities said.

Stewart Silvestri is charged with unlawful possession of a machine gun and faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if found guilty, the US Attorney for Massachusetts said.

…

Police searched the car and found eight privately made “ghost guns,” two of them were fully automatic, the US Attorney’s Office said. Officers also found hundreds of rounds of ammunition and many firearms parts, the prosecutor said.

Unfortunately, we don’t know the nature of the machine guns.

My guess is that these “ghost guns” were handguns with full-auto switches. Those seem to be particularly popular with the criminal class these days, which makes sense. They’re fairly concealable and can lay down a lot of firepower very quickly.

And yes, they’re illegal as hell.

Plus, let’s note that this is in Massachusetts, which has some of the tightest gun control laws in the nation. Despite all of that, this guy got not just “ghost guns,” which are surprisingly still legal in the state, but was able to make them fire full-auto. You know, machine guns.

That’s because criminals don’t obey laws. If they want a thing and there’s a way to get the thing, they get the thing. They don’t care if said thing is legal or illegal or somewhere in between. They’re criminals. If they cared about laws, they wouldn’t be criminals.

This isn’t rocket science, yet some people seem to believe it is.

They believe that if we just pass a few more gun control laws, put a few more restrictions in place, we’ll see an end to violent crime forever.

Yet what we see here is that one of the most tightly controlled types of firearms–one that’s been heavily restricted for almost 90 years now–is well within reach of the average criminal, all while the law-abiding really cannot access such a weapon lawfully in any way, shape, or form.

Gun control is a failure, and this is a prime example of why it’s a failure. It’ll always be a failure because it invariably targets the wrong people.

And Massachusetts is a prime example of just how little it accomplishes.

Of course, they’re far from the only one or even the worse offender in this regard, but you have to ask yourself how well gun control is working anywhere if the bad guys are getting their hands on machine guns.

Most anti-gunners won’t like the answer.