One argument many make regarding gun control is that while criminals won’t obey laws, if we make it more difficult – not necessarily impossible, mind you, just more difficult – for law-abiding citizens to get guns, then it will eventually make it more difficult for criminals to get firearms as well.

If you don’t really understand the issue, that might make some degree of sense to you. After all, if bad guys can’t get guns directly from gun stores, then inhibiting lawful sales has to impact them, right?

Not really.

You see, criminals have myriad ways to get guns. As things stand in the United States right now, though, much of that isn’t from gun stores. Sometimes, sure, because the bad guy just doesn’t have a criminal record, though that’s rare.

Then you’ve got people who will do things like this:

Police say a chase that ended in Louisville on Tuesday is connected to a gun store robbery in Jeffersonville, and several arrests have been made.

A man and six juveniles are now in custody, Jeffersonville police said Wednesday.

They said said that around 1:20 a.m. Tuesday, they responded to an alarm at the Kentuckiana Gun Store.

Officers arrived at the scene and found that the front door of the business had been forced open and saw a white Mustang leaving the area at a high rate of speed. A trooper tried to initiate a traffic stop, but the car fled, police said.

They were, of course, eventually caught.

However, this is why gun control will never disarm the criminals in our society.

There was no Form 4473 for these seven. They didn’t make a call for a NICS check. They didn’t show ID. They didn’t even show a concealed carry permit to bypass the NICS check. They did none of the things that you or I have to do when we go to a gun store, all measures we’re told are necessary to keep people like this disarmed.

Those requirements worked about as well as using Ex-lax as a treatment for diarrhea.

So how are restrictions that impact people like me supposed to “trickle down” to people like them?

Let’s also remember that most of the guns stolen aren’t taken from gun stores. They’re taken from law-abiding citizens who have already jumped through all the hoops required of them and have taken possession of their firearms. They’ve typically had them for several years before they’re stolen.

Then they end up on the black market. They’re traded back and forth among those who follow no gun control laws.

So how do new gun control regulations impact them?

The simple answer is that it doesn’t. They take what they want, and if they want guns, they take guns. The sooner we accept this simple fact as a society, the sooner we can address the deeper issues at play behind the criminal use of firearms in the first place.

Gun control clearly doesn’t need to be part of that discussion.