If you’re a fugitive from justice, you can’t buy a gun lawfully. Your name is entered into the NICS database and you’re not buying a gun from a gun store no matter what you try. Not lawfully, anyway.

Then again, if you’re a fugitive, there’s a high likelihood that you’re used to doing things that aren’t lawful. Yeah, I know that we see movies all the time of innocent people becoming fugitives to clear their names, but Hollywood isn’t known for reflecting reality.

Yet despite these problems, US Marshals recently arrested six people with a number of firearms handy, including the fugitive they were hunting.

Six fugitives are in custody and several guns are recovered after a standoff in Cleveland on Wednesday.

The standoff happened in the 2700 block of Seymour Avenue, where investigators were looking for 35-year-old Michael Cullen, wanted for a parole violation. Investigators say he was on parole for prior weapons and drug offenses.

When investigators knocked on the door, several people came out, but Cullen was barricading himself inside, U.S. Marshals say.

Eventually, Cullen was apprehended. The marshals found three handguns and an AR-15 on the premises. The AR, however, was actually a pistol, for the record.

Now, it’s interesting to me how this guy–a wanted fugitive–was able to get a gun despite his criminal record. It’s possible that one of the others arrested was able to buy the guns lawfully. Not all, as at least one appears to be under the age of 21, but maybe the rest who were of lawful age and were apparently not a target of the investigation. Regardless, Cullen had access to firearms.

And the gun control argument falls apart here because if a fugitive can get his hands on guns, then none of the laws on the books are going to work.

Maybe that means taking a step back and reevaluating what we do with regard to people like this and evaluating how we can make it so they won’t seek out guns in the first place.

I say that because I don’t care how you try to slice it, if they want guns, they will get guns. So, let’s work to remove their desire to obtain firearms, particularly for illicit uses.

Unfortunately, that’s difficult. It’s complicated and we don’t know where to start, so some folks just push this idea that gun control is the answer when clearly it’s not. Gun control was supposed to keep people like Cullen from getting a gun in the first place, yet here we are.

This idea that we should keep doubling down on things we know don’t work is particularly troubling, in part because it meets the popular definition of insanity so many people use. It’s doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, which just isn’t going to happen.

Fugitives can get guns. Gang members can get guns. Felons can get them, too.

At some point, gun control needs to be abandoned for something that might actually work.