Massachusetts has long been known as one of the most gun-controlled states in the nation. While other states have surpassed it with their own gun control laws, the state is still no slouch on anti-gun regulation.

And many of the people who live there like it that way. Many others don’t, but based on elections in the state, we can kind of tell which crowd is in the majority.

Yet gun control doesn’t stop criminals from doing things. We’ve long known that, yet gun control activists keep pretending it’s not a thing, that bad guys somehow get stopped.

If so, maybe they can explain how this awful tragedy happened.

Authorities are investigating a fatal shooting that occurred in Brockton on Friday afternoon.

According to the Plymouth County DA, officers responded to a shooting around 3:23 p.m. at 131 Lynn Road in Brockton.

A 15-year-old male was shot and killed, the DA says.

…

The DA says a 17-year-old male has been arrested and charged with possessing a firearm.

So, my question is, if gun control works so well in Massachusetts, how did a 17-year-old come into possession of a firearm in the first place?

Oh, some will say that it came in from out of state, which may well be true–it may also have been stolen from someone in-state, though–but Massachusetts has laws in place that are supposed to prevent guns from falling into 17-year-old hands. There’s a permit-to-purchase requirement and everyone is supposed to have a permit to even keep the guns they already own.

If those laws worked, a gun coming in from another state shouldn’t have ended up in a kid’s hands.

Or maybe the issue is that criminals don’t care about laws? I know it sounds crazy to gun control advocates, but as you try to erect more and more barriers that inhibit the lawful buying and selling of firearms, you’re not really doing anything to the bad guys who aren’t trying to get guns lawfully.

Sure, they might not be able to lie to someone and claim they’re a law-abiding citizen and skirt a background check or whatever, but that’s not exactly how most criminals get guns in the first place. They steal them from law-abiding citizens or they buy them on the black market. Neither of those is going to be impacted by yet another gun control law.

What’s more, guns being smuggled in from other states is already against the law.

Massachusetts built a framework of gun control laws in the name of preventing crime, but all that’s happened is that it dissuaded a lot of people from exercising their right to keep and bear arms, all while criminals continue to shoot up neighborhoods and kill innocent kids.

Gun control simply doesn’t work.

The one thing it does is distract us from talking about solutions that might actually do something in the long run. We’re too busy discussing a right that “shall not be infringed” that we’re not about to really get down to work and start finding real solutions.