Huffington Post loves gun laws. They can’t get enough of gun laws, actually.

As a result, the crowd over there was always going to love the bipartisan gun control effort passed in the wake of Uvalde. So it’s not surprising that they’d find a way to celebrate its success if there was any way to do so.

It seems they found a way to do just that.

The gun reform law Congress passed after two mass shootings by teenagers last year has begun blocking some firearm sales to people under 21.

So far, more stringent background checks for younger gun buyers have resulted in 64 denied transactions, an FBI spokesperson told HuffPost on Wednesday.

…

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), one of the lead authors of the law, said Justice Department officials told him during an early January congressional visit to a background check facility in Clarksburg, West Virginia, that the new policy had blocked 27 firearm sales to people under 21.

“They’re starting to actually deny gun purchases based on juvenile mental health and criminal records,” Cornyn told HuffPost. “It’s just the beginning, and hopefully as the bill’s being implemented it will have a bigger impact.”

There’s no doubt 64 rejected transactions represent a small impact, given the overall volume of gun purchases. People with felony criminal records or restraining orders have long been barred from gun ownership, and in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, the national background check system ran nearly 10 million checks, denying more than 153,000 transactions, according to the FBI’s latest report.

But the blocked sales represent a momentous political change after decades of congressional inaction on rising gun violence, which in 2020 became the leading cause of death among children in the United States. Some kids today have personally experienced multiple mass shootings in their short lifetimes, including Jackie Matthews, a Michigan State University senior present for the Sandy Hook massacre of 2012 and another mass shooting at her current campus this week.

Except there’s absolutely no evidence that any of these 64 people were actually going to do anything illegal. We don’t know why they were prohibited, and in theory, they’re supposed to be able to enjoy the totality of their rights when they turned 18. After all, the gun law in question directs agencies to look at juvenile records as well.

So, someone screws up as a kid, walks the straight and narrow until they become an adult, then decide to buy a gun for home defense, only to be told they can’t because of something they did when they were 12.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Further, if the gun law only stopped 64 people despite the millions of gun sales since the gun law was passed, doesn’t it really illustrate that maybe this wasn’t as big of an issue as some people liked to claim? Oh, we can pretend that this is about mass shootings, but we haven’t seen a lot of evidence of that being the case. After all, they brought up Sandy Hook, where the killer murdered his own mother so he could take her guns.

I’m sorry, but this “celebration” of a gun law just illustrates how small the issue was in the first place.

Violent crime hasn’t been impacted. We’ve had three major mass shootings this year and it’s only mid-February. Literally nothing has been accomplished except for denying 64 adults without a criminal record as an adult from exercising their Second Amendment rights.

That’s it.

This gun law isn’t something to celebrate. It’s something to mock.