One of the key issues with gun control is two-fold. Gun control impacts regular, law-abiding people who want to buy firearms all while doing nothing to inhibit criminals from doing the same in the grand scheme of things.
Sure, those laws might stop bad guys from getting them from gun stores, but it's not like there's any real difficulty in them getting them overall.
After all, just look at cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. All three are in anti-gun states and all three have an issue with violent criminals obtaining guns in spite of the numerous laws supposedly designed to prevent just that.
Or, perhaps we should look at Canada. They have the national gun control laws we're constantly told are essential to stopping the bloodshed in those cities.
Yet an arrest over gold undermines that argument as well.
Thousands of gold bars worth C$20m ($14.5m; £11.6m) were stolen from the Toronto airport in Canada a year ago.
Police have since said the gold was sold for cash to buy guns in the US.
Officials allege the arrested suspects had planned to smuggle the guns into Canada, which has strict gun laws, and sell them on the black market.
"This isn't just about gold," said Nando Iannicca, chair of the Peel Regional Police, the force responsible for the arrest of nine suspects who were allegedly involved in the heist.
"This is about how gold becomes guns."
The smuggling of illegal guns from the US has long been a source of concern for police in Canada, where most firearms - save for shotguns and rifles - are restricted or prohibited.
Now, this particular story wants to try and paint the US as the bad guy here, but what they aren't going to say is that if someone will steal gold, sell it for cash, and then use that cash to buy guns illegally, why do they think American gun laws would somehow prevent them from just looking elsewhere?
Drugs, for example, are illegal pretty much everywhere in the world, yet we have it in every community in the nation whether we want it there or not.
People import drugs through a variety of means. They manufacture it illegally and in secret labs throughout the world. Then they put them on the streets for anyone who has the money.
Guns aren't any different.
Let's remember that it's already illegal to export firearms without express government permission. Even though Canada is a close ally of the United States, you can't just sell a gun to someone up there, even if it complies with all of Canada's gun control laws, without getting the go-ahead from the State Department.
The laws wouldn't have stopped these guys.
They won't stop the next bunch, either.
The reason is that gun control doesn't stop the criminal. It stops the regular, law-abiding person who doesn't want to risk going to jail. The criminal has a tendency to figure they'll get away with whatever it is they think they want to do. That includes buying guns illegally.
What's more, enough of them get away with it that there's a reason they figure things will work out for them.
Criminals will do what they can to get guns, and not even national gun control laws will prevent that.
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