Over the last handful of years, we’ve seen the once pro-gun Pacific Northwest go deeper and deeper down the gun control rabbit hole.

Oregon has especially gone down it and gone down hard.

The only thing stopping them from being more anti-gun is the courts are telling them they tried to go way too far.

Like a lot of other places, Oregon has restrictions on guns for people below specific ages. That’s on top of federal laws along those lines, of course.

And how well do they work?

Well, you tell me.

Officials say the Portland Police Bureau’s Focused Intervention Team and Enhanced Community Safety Team and other law agencies executed a high-risk search and arrest warrant in the 6900 block of North Jersey Street.

…

During the search warrant, officials found a 9 mm handgun with a 50-round drum magazine and a “switch” which allows the handgun to become a fully automatic firearm. They also found evidence of a negligent discharge of a firearm inside the residence.

The suspect, an 18-year-old male, may be a legal adult but he’s still too young to lawfully buy a handgun of any caliber. It’s not just Oregon state law but federal law.

And yet, he had it.

Sort of like he had the full-auto switch that isn’t legal in any state in the country.

See, when criminals want something, laws aren’t going to stop them. The age restriction on handgun purchases was specifically enacted to prevent bad actors from getting handguns. The restrictions on full-auto firearms were done for the same reason years earlier.

As we can see, though, that doesn’t matter for squat.

Meanwhile, the good, decent people under the age of 21 are left with fewer options for defending themselves because they actually follow the law.

Now, tell me just who is made safer because those folks are barred from buying handguns?

The criminals are still getting them and the good guys aren’t. That doesn’t exactly make for a peaceful society, really. What you want is, at best, the reverse. The issue is that you can’t keep bad guys disarmed. It’s not possible because they’ll buy and sell whatever they want, again, regardless of the laws.

Oregon drank the gun control Kool-Aid and has made life difficult for lawful gun owners and those who wish to be gun owners.

Meanwhile, an 18-year-old kid was effectively walking around with a machine gun in his pants–and no, that’s not a euphemism for anything…this time–and shooting up neighborhoods, which is how the cops got clued in on him in the first place.

Gun control doesn’t stop criminals. It stops law-abiding people.

That, in turn, makes things that much easier for the bad guys among our population. Does Oregon care, though? Well, probably. They’re just pathologically incapable of seeing the truth, it seems.

That’s a shame, too, because a case like this should serve as a wake-up call for the entire state. Unfortunately, the anti-gun Kool-Aid is powerful stuff and won’t let hold of people easily.