In the wake of a mass shooting, people always look to gun control. I get the thinking–I can’t call it reasoning, mind you, but I get it. They believe that the gun was somehow the deciding factor in what happened, so that needs to be restricted.

That’s what happened in Boulder after the King Souper’s grocery store shooting. The law was challenged, of course, and it’s working its way through the court system now.

Yet there’s a comment here I simply can’t let slide.

 It didn’t take long after the King Soopers shooting in Boulder for city leaders to start talking about guns. They promised to pass laws limiting access to the weapons used to kill 10 people inside the grocery store. Two years later, their fight continues in court.

“I’m proud that we followed up that terrible tragedy not just with thoughts and prayers that you hear so often from politicians, but with actual actions that we’ve taken to keep our communities safer,” said Aaron Brockett, the mayor of Boulder.

The thing is, Brockett knows this is male bovine excrement and is peddling it to his constituents just the same.

What Boulder did was pass a local ordinance. It has absolutely no impact on literally anyone not inside the city limits. It also doesn’t have any practical impact on any potential mass shooter who already has such a weapon or those who purchased them elsewhere and brought them into the city.

As such, the law is nothing but words on a page and only binds people who aren’t a threat in the first place.

Brockett has to know and understand this. So why say it?

Because he knows if he acknowledges that the law is useless, people won’t support it. Why pass a law that won’t actually do anything? It just seems silly to most people.

So he overstates the potential benefits of such a law–that it will keep Boulder safe–and pretends that it actually will and prays that no one figures out how full of it he really is.

The law won’t do any such thing and anyone who bothers to look at this critically should be able to see that.

Then again, if you take this thinking and expand it, the same is true of just about every other gun control law you care to name. Almost none have any impact on the dangerous people in our midst. They never have and they never will. Look at January in California, where they suffered from two major mass shootings in less than two days for an example.

The mayor of Boulder can say what he wants, but it doesn’t change reality.

He and other local lawmakers did nothing to make anyone safer. All they did was make things more difficult for the law-abiding citizens there who don’t represent a threat to anyone.

That, however, doesn’t make for a good soundbite for local news coverage, so he says something else and hopes people are too stupid to see through it.

Too bad for him that we’re not.