What happened at a block party in Baltimore is beyond awful. While it doesn’t have a massive death toll, the fact that 30 people were shot, two fatally, is enough of a sign that the city has problems.

The mayor, however, thinks he has answers.

He’s arguing for gun control.

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott is pleading to get illegal guns off the streets after a shooting in the Brooklyn neighborhood took two lives and injured dozens more.

This year alone, the mayor said Sunday, Baltimore police have seized 1,343 illegal guns.

“They were in the hands of people who should not have had them, that had them anyway because they are so easy to obtain,” Mayor Scott.

Around midnight Sunday morning, 30 people between the ages of 13 to 32 were shot, and 15 of them were minors.

…

Mayor Scott, and other leaders, say these illegal guns are coming from out of state.

“That choice was given to them because of the access to illegal guns. Where do most of the guns in Baltimore come from? They come from outside of Maryland,” Mayor Scott said. “We have to do it at the national level as well.”

Mayor Scott challenged gun manufacturers, and those selling “ghost guns,” to keep the weapons out of the hands of those who want to illegally possess them.

Well, gun manufacturers are already prohibited from just handing weapons to prohibited persons. All their sales have to go through an FFL, which means NICS checks and a form 4473. They literally can’t do anything more than that.

Those who are selling “ghost guns” are doing it illegally, however, and I doubt they’re going to be all that concerned about background checks.

In fact, conflating the two kinds of manufacturers is downright insulting.

But hey, Scott says, “We have to do it at the national level as well.” That’s a call for gun control.

The problem here is that we don’t actually know what happened. We know the shooting happened but almost nothing about the guns used, where they came from, how they were obtained, or anything. Scott is calling for action when absolutely no one can know what action to take.

Unless, of course, this is just a pretext, like all the other shootings have been.

No one actually cares about these kids. They just care about their opportunity to strike at gun rights. They want to pass gun control so badly that they’ll use these kids’ bodies as a soapbox from which to try and restrict our right to keep and bear arms.

For Scott, this is just another way to shift the blame for his inability to rein in violence in his city. “It’s not my fault, it’s all those evil gun companies that won’t do things that are impossible for them to do anyway. If they’d just do the impossible, we wouldn’t have these problems.”

That’s what this is, so make no mistake.

Anti-gun lawmakers will simply continue to use any excuse to restrict guns they can find, even holding up events as evidence their preferred course of action is needed, even when we don’t know the details.