Over recent years, we’ve seen more and more lawmakers and their buddies in the media talking about so-called ghost guns. They’ve taken a relatively obscure hobby within the gun community–building a firearm from a kit–and turned it into a federal case.

Many anti-gun legislators have tried to push to ban such weapons, all in some bizarre effort to somehow curtail the actions of those who don’t care about laws.

I mean, I get why people are freaking out over buying a piece of plastic that can be turned into a receiver with a template and some easily-purchased tools. They’re wrong to be worried about that rather than the people who would do so for criminal purposes, but I understand where it comes from.

Washington State is one place that reacted to the fear by trying to prohibit so-called ghost guns.

The problem is, they can’t actually stop them.

Detectives recovered four ghost-guns and a 3D printer after arresting 24-year-old Romeo Plummer for a drive-by shooting.

…

While searching through Plummer’s Seattle home, detectives found four ghost guns, a 3D printer, ammunition, and other evidence linking Plummer to the shooting.

Now that can’t be possible because the bunch at Everytown assures me that Washington State has a ban on ghost guns. This simply cannot be!

Only, it is.

See, what people need to understand is that making your own guns is something that’s been around forever, and while technology has marched on, it basically just made it easier.

Even without it, though, there are ways to make guns. There’s everything from a zip gun to P.A. Luty’s submachine gun design based on things you can get at a hardware store.

You’re never getting that genie back in the bottle. Especially since 3D printers are continuing to gain in popularity and may well reach a point where every household has one. If that happens, do you really think you can somehow keep people from printing out receivers and making their own “ghost guns” or anything else they want?

Of course not.

Couple that with the fact that literally everything else is just a gun part that people are going to want to buy to replace or upgrade their existing firearms and you’ve got a situation where you can do literally nothing to stop people like this guy.

The truth is, gun control is dead. It’s time to start trying something different.

There are a lot of reasons someone might become violent, so it’s time we start to recognize that the best way to prevent violent crime isn’t by, at best, forcing bad people to use a different weapon, but by undermining the things that lead them to that kind of a lifestyle in the first place.

Unfortunately, no one on the other side of the debate–the very people who should be most open to some of these interventions–is interested in hearing about it. They just want the guns and that’s all it’s about for them.

They just want your guns and every other argument is just to accomplish that goal.