To hear the average gun control advocate talk, you'd think that getting a gun in a pro-gun state is so easy that criminals wouldn't have any difficulty going into a gun store and getting a weapon.

In their minds, it seems that we're just standing out on the street corner, handing guns to literally anyone who wants them, nary a care in the world.

The thing is, most of us aren't really fond of criminals getting guns. For me, my problems stem from the fact that our criminal justice system doesn't exactly reform people or even deter them from running afoul of the law again, thus "allowing" people released from prison to remain criminal in nature, but not everyone shares that opinion.

That's fine.

Yet if the anti-gunners are right, I'm mystified how this incident in Fairbanks, Alaska happened.

A federal grand jury in Alaska returned an indictment charging a Fairbanks man with stealing multiple guns from a local firearm dealer. 

According to court documents, on March 10, 2024, 25-year-old Darel Puller stole 22 firearms from a local gun store in Fairbanks.

Twenty-one of those firearms were part of the business inventory, as reflected in count one of the indictment.

One firearm belonged to the store’s owner that was not part of the businesses inventory, as reflected in count two of the indictment. 

The defendant will make his initial court appearance on a later date before a U.S. Magistrate Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska.

Puller is looking at a maximum of 10 years in prison.

Now, let's be honest here. You're never going to prevent criminals from stealing guns. Theft of any kind is illegal and has been since at least the Code of Hammurabi was written in 1754 BCE. I don't think you can make it any more illegal if you wanted to.

We also have tons of laws dictating how guns can be lawfully transfered from a gun dealer.

None of those stopped this theft. Whether Puller did it or not is largely irrelevant to our purposes here. What matters is that 22 firearms were stolen from a gun store despite all of the laws on the books meant to prevent it.

And Alaska is a pro-gun state. 

If pro-gun states are just too free with guns--so free with them, in fact that criminals can just get a gun as easily as getting a bag of chips--then why did someone need to steal 22 firearms in the first place? 

Maybe Puller (allegedly) was just bored or looking to go into the gun trade himself. He didn't need to, he just wanted to.

Moreover, how are you ever going to stop criminals from getting guns if there are guns out there to steal? All the hurdles to gun purchases in the world can't stop criminals who will just steal the guns.

The short answer is that you can't.

When bad people want guns, the only real limit is their imagination. If they can't steal them, they'll make them--and they did long before so-called ghost gun kits were a thing--and if they can't make them, they'll just import them.

You're not stopping the flow of guns to criminal hands unless you deal with the criminal hands directly.