Most gun control advocates argue that they prefer restrictions on guns as a means to keep firearms out of the hands of criminals. It’s something that people can understand and with a media that supports gun control, it’s something that’s pushed hard.

However, our side of the argument is that it doesn’t do any such thing. It inhibits good guys while doing little to stop the bad guys.

Yet many will try to frame it differently, such as this op-ed does.

At the end of last year, we commemorated the 10-year mark since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. This year, mass shootings have infected red states, including at an elementary school shooting in Tennessee. Unsurprisingly, the extremist gun lobby — with assistance from both Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court and former President Trump’s MAGA movement — continues to put up resistance to new gun laws that would protect the life and liberty of law-abiding citizens and their kids.

The MAGA-gun lobby’s core belief is that new gun laws will disarm the law-abiding — and will do so when the law-abiding need firearms to defend themselves against either criminals or a tyrannical government or both.

The dual ideals of life and liberty drive the MAGA-gun lobby’s dependence on the Second Amendment: they want unlimited liberty to protect their lives, even if it means other law-abiding citizens lose theirs. This fanaticism has fueled their absolutist and unrestricted role of the Second Amendment, essentially rewriting it to give gun rights to criminals — and allowing criminals the freedom to get firearms and endanger the law-abiding.

[Emphasis added]

Except, criminals aren’t really free to get firearms. Convicted felons and those who use illicit drugs cannot lawfully buy firearms. They don’t actually have “the freedom to get firearms” in the first place.

Moreover, we know from numerous studies that criminals don’t get their guns lawfully in the first place. Even those who haven’t been convicted of a felony tend to obtain their firearms either through theft or via the black market.

If illegally obtaining guns is “freedom to get firearms,” then I’ve got bad news for the author: You’re never going to address the problems of so-called gun violence.

That’s because bad guys don’t follow the law. Universal background checks mean I have to go through one when buying a gun from a buddy, but the criminal buying it from a black market dealer isn’t going to conduct any such thing.

That’s what’s idiotic about all of this.

What the author calls “allowing criminals the freedom to get firearms” is nothing of the sort. We already do things that we were assured would prevent just that. NICS checks, for example.

Unless, of course, he somehow believes that you and I are the criminals.

If so, he’s going to have an even harder time to make his point, because we’re nothing of the sort. Then again, anti-gunners haven’t exactly acted like they even see us as particularly human, so why should anyone be surprised?