No matter what laws you try to put in place to keep criminals from getting guns, criminals will still find a way to get them. All a law can do is prohibit an activity to law-abiding citizens. For the bad guys, it’s nothing.

For example, you can pass universal background checks all day long, but criminals aren’t going to be cut off from firearms with that.

Especially when they can just steal a bunch of guns.

More than 100 handguns were stolen from a store in southwestern Michigan after the manager was held at gunpoint outside his home and forced to reveal how to turn off the alarm, authorities said Tuesday.

All guns except one were recovered and two men were arrested Friday, a day after the brazen heist at Dunham’s Sports, US Attorney Mark Totten said.

“Just look at the firepower on this table,” Jim Deir, head of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Michigan, told reporters.

“There’s over $100,000 worth of guns here. … My experience: These were headed to the streets. These were headed for quick sale, quick money,” Deir said.

The two men, who are brothers, are accused of targeting a Dunham’s near Benton Harbor, 100 miles east of Chicago.

Now, personally, I think they might be overstating the value of these guns. None of the most popular handguns generally run in the $1,000 range, so I doubt more than 100 handguns were worth $100K. Even on the street, I doubt they’d go for that much.

Still, that’s a lot of firearms.

Had the authorities not caught them, these guns would likely arm numerous bad guys regardless of any laws you care to put in place. After all, if laws would stop them, the laws against theft would have already worked long ago.

And make no mistake, this is how bad guys get guns in most cases. They’re not walking into a gun store and getting a firearm across the counter with a wink and a nod so they can skip the NICS check. They’re not having them handed to them out the back door, either.

They generally get them either from people who stole them such as these two or they’re stealing them themselves. That’s how they get them and how do you create a law that prevents that?

The short answer is that you can’t.

In this case, almost all of the guns were recovered. That’s good news. Stolen firearms are bad for everyone, after all.

But in a lot of other cases, they’re not recovered. They’re not seen again until they are recovered on the person of a criminal or at a crime scene.

Again, a new law won’t prevent that from happening, especially since the Courts have already killed the idea of a gun ban. That’s not likely to change no matter who gets nominated to the Court down the road.

If you can’t stop criminals from getting guns–and really, this should illustrate why you can’t–then that leaves empowering people to protect themselves from the kind of people who would put a gun to someone’s head and make him turn off the alarm code.

That leaves gun rights.