California is often held up as a shining example of gun control. They get the best grades from groups like Giffords, they get singled out by anti-gun voices for their efforts to restrict firearms, and all the accolades that you can think of relating to being anti-Second Amendment.

School shootings just shouldn’t be a thing in the Golden State, now should they?

Well, the state managed to dodge that particular bullet with a recent arrest, but in the process, it shows just how little good all that gun control did.

A San Diego high school student and his father were arrested Tuesday after the student allegedly threatened to carry out a shooting on campus.

The San Diego Police Department received several reports that the teenager had allegedly told some Rancho Bernardo High School students on Friday that he planned a shooting at the school on Tuesday, NBC San Diego reported.

Police filed a gun violence restraining order at the teen’s home, which allows the temporary removal of firearms from people who may be at risk of harming themselves or others.

Detectives who went to the home a few blocks from the school found several unregistered guns, explosives, rocket-propelled grenades, and supplies to make rifle and handgun ghost guns, the station said.

Now, I can hear some folks trying to claim that the red flag law–a gun control measure that we oppose–helped catch these would-be mass murderers.

However, let’s also remember that making threats is criminal. Reports of threats are probable cause for a search warrant, which would allow police to see if the kid had guns, so I’m not buying the claim that the red flag order is the only mechanism that could have done anything. Had that not been an option, law enforcement could have still prevented the school shooting.

And that’s assuming they bothered to shoot up the school rather than something even more horrific.

Look, gun control isn’t just supposed to stop school shooting or other acts of mass murder involving a firearm, but also keep people from getting guns in the first place.

Yet look at what all these two had sitting in their house for a moment.

It turns out the RPG was inert, which means that was really more of a decoration or collector’s piece than anything else. The media has gotten a little excited about that sort of thing before, though, so no surprise on that one.

Regardless, explosives are tightly controlled and they had those. They had stuff to make “ghost guns,” which are illegal in California.

They had plenty of other things that made it clear that gun control wasn’t going to stop a school shooting.

What did?

Someone reported the threat.

That’s the single most important step anyone can take in preventing something like another Parkland and rather than have that discussion, we have people wanting to ban various types of firearm.

Of course, it’s never really about the types of weapons, it’s about using things like school shootings as justification for infringing on our rights. It always has been and it always will be.