On Thursday, I wrote about a case out of the UK where a drug operation had a number of guns, one of which was used on another person. It was mostly just another example of how UK gun laws don't really work as well as some might believe.

I fully intended for that to be the last I looked at for a while. It's not so much that there isn't gun crime in the UK, only that we don't often see a whole lot of it in our news feeds on this side of the Atlantic. That's especially true with how Google works, and not necessarily only because of their anti-gun bias.

But when a massive example of gun control failure drops in my lap, well, what's a guy to do?

A crime gang responsible for the biggest gun running plot ever countered by UK law enforcement operated its main stash house from a plush Ancoats residential development. A property in the Cotton Field Wharf plot at Ancoats Marina was rented out to store guns, ammunition, drugs and ‘vast’ amounts of cash.

Adrian Gonzalez, 33, the gangster in charge of the stash house, has now been jailed for 25 years. The gang’s ringleader, Omar Malik, was previously jailed for 38 years while four other conspirators were also handed lengthy prison sentences.

A judge at Manchester Crown Court said the gang were responsible for criminality on an ‘exceptional scale’. They were behind the supply of cocaine worth £70m, and sold 48 Skorpion machine pistols to other gangsters across the UK and Ireland.

“This trade in guns and ammunition, Mr Gonzalez, was described by an expert in this field as being amongst the very highest level of criminal firearm trafficking ever encountered by law enforcement in the United Kingdom,” Judge John Potter told Gonzalez, who he labelled a ‘determined’ and ‘professional criminal’.

“You proved willing to be active in a trade, which on any view, causes misery to many within our communities. You knew and appreciated this harm arising from your actions. You were inspired by nothing more than greed and selfishness, in my judgement, to sacrifice the welfare of countless others, with a view to make you very rich indeed.”

Now, let's understand that these were machine pistols, not just your garden variety handgun you see in most of our black market transactions. These were particularly dangerous firearms that wouldn't be legal here in the US in most cases.

And the UK's supposedly strict gun control laws did absolutely nothing to prevent them.

In fact, one could make the argument that because of those gun control laws, it's just as easy to trade machine guns as more pedestrian firearms. After all, if you're going to have to import them and if any purchase or sale is highly illegal, why not go big?

Our criminals are dealing with stolen guns. Those are mostly what people like you and I can buy without an issue.

Criminals in the UK have no such circumstances. They have to get what they can, and that sometimes means full-auto versus semi-auto.

This is one of those unintended consequences to strict gun control, it seems, and this was yet another example of a group being sentenced not just for having a gun, but a lot of guns.

So much for how great UK gun control actually is.