On Saturday, I wrote about a gun store robbery in South Carolina. There, the bad guys got away with around two dozen guns.

I write about that when I can because this is part of how criminals get firearms in the first place. Store robberies make headlines whereas one or two firearms being stolen out of a home generally doesn’t, and this is how most criminals get their guns.

“But Tom, that was just one store.”

Sure, that was one store. If it was just one store alone, it wouldn’t matter. It would be a statistical blip on the radar.

The problem is that it’s never just one store or even one home. There’s almost always another.

Say, two in Texas.

MCKINNEY, Texas — A $10,000 reward is being offered for any information about a suspect behind two burglaries at a federal firearms licensee in McKinney.

According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Gebo’s was burglarized twice and 21 guns in total were taken. Surveillance images from both incidents were shared in hopes someone recognized the suspect.

The first incident happened on Saturday, Aug. 12, at 1:10 a.m. Officials say the burglar broke in and stole nine guns.

The second burglary was on Monday, Aug. 14, at about 11 p.m. Officials believe the same burglar from two days prior got in from the back of the store. The suspect could not open the handgun cases, but ended up taking 12 long guns.

One guy, two gun store robberies.

And make no mistake, these aren’t isolated.

This is where most firearms in criminal hands come from. They’re not from unscrupulous gun stores or from some shady international arms smuggler. They come from some dipstick breaking into stores and stealing the guns, then selling them on the streets.

A lot of time, the burglars are stupid and make it easy, posting pictures of the guns on social media, making it very easy for the police to track down the offender.

But not every gun store burglar is that stupid. Some are smart enough to keep a low profile and already have the needed connections to sell the guns without being obvious to the police.

Then criminals use these weapons, injuring or killing innocent people, and the gun control crowd swoops in and demands things like universal background checks and red flag laws, none of which will do anything about guns being stolen from stores that are desperately trying to comply with every rule and regulation out there.

The anti-gun crowd doesn’t actually care, though, because so many of them really don’t see criminals as the bad guys.

No, they reserve that for us.

We don’t give up our gun rights because, in part, we know that it’s incidents like this that put guns in criminal hands, not lax regulations. We gave up pieces of our rights for years in the name of safety, and do you know what we got for that? Nothing. Nothing at all.

The NFA was passed to address mob violence during prohibition, but it was the end of prohibition that caused the murder rate to drop. The Gun Control Act of 1968 preceded a massive spike in violent crime. The murder rate was dropping before the Assault Weapon Ban passed and continued dropping well after it sunset.

And because we see that, it’s not the gun store burglars who are demonized, it’s us for not bowing down yet again and allowing our rights to be shredded, all when for new laws that won’t actually do anything.