Let's understand that California has the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. When you consider some of the laws elsewhere, that's quite the accomplishment. It's nothing to be proud of, but it's an accomplishment.

To hear gun control advocates tell it, gun control makes California super safe.

Yet two high-profile incidents did nothing to make anyone more confident about that.

The first was a bus trip that went horribly wrong.

One person was killed when a Metro bus was hijacked at gunpoint around 12:45 a.m. Wednesday in stringently gun-controlled Los Angeles, California.

KTLA reported that LAPD received calls regarding the incident and learned that “a person on the bus had pulled out a gun, prompting the bus driver to activate a panic button that displays a ‘CALL 911’ outside the bus.”

Responding officers located the bus “near West 117th Street and South Figueroa Street,” but it began to be driven away from them as they approached it. Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Donald Graham noted that the bus driver had a gun to his head and drove away from officers because he was ordered to do so.

...

The suspected hijacker was arrested and a bus passenger with multiple gunshot wounds was discovered. That passenger died later in the hospital.

Los Angeles isn't exactly some rural community riddled with guns in spite of the plethora of gun control measures on the books. It's a pretty anti-gun city, and yet this twerp got a gun, shot some passenger, and killed him, then hijacked the bus and apparently thought he'd get away with it.

I suspect that when we learn more about the suspect, we'll find that he had a record that prohibited him from buying a firearm lawfully, which will shatter even more narratives for anyone with an open mind.

Yet what if people can't get guns? That's what anti-gunners keep telling us. If bad people can't get guns at all, they can't do things like this. How they'll preserve our right to keep and bear arms while making it impossible for criminals to obtain them is never really explained, but let's say that there's a way. Let's say you could keep guns away from the bad people entirely.

Would that make us safer?

Well, based on what happened in Sacramento, probably not.

A man who was facing a firearms charge walked into a California courthouse on the day of his arraignment Wednesday morning and threw a bag containing an explosive that went off, injuring several people, officials said.

The incident at a courthouse in Santa Maria appears to be isolated and the suspect has no known ties to terrorism, but the FBI, along with the US Attorney’s Office, are investigating the incident.

Shortly after the explosion, the suspect, identified as 20-year-old Nathaniel McGuire, was apprehended by a security guard, a Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputy and California Highway Patrol officers, Undersheriff Craig Bonner said during a news conference hours after the incident.

He was arrested on suspicion of several felonies, including attempted murder, using an explosive device in attempting to kill someone and possession of explosive devices, Bonner said.

Six people were injured in the explosion.

Everyone there was lucky it wasn't worse.

Yes, this guy was facing firearms charges, but he's also 20. Under California law, he can't buy any firearm lawfully, so those gun control laws failed on their own. Then he built a bomb and tried to kill a bunch of people with that.

Explosives are one of those things that are highly restricted and virtually no one is trying to make more readily available to the general public. I could make the argument, but the truth is that no one needs to. The information on making an explosive is out there on the internet for anyone to access if they want and this guy did.

He didn't need a gun for this. 

What's more, if the most dangerous among us decided they wanted to hurt and kill a bunch of people and couldn't get a gun, they'd do stuff like this. In fact, if more people had been killed, I suspect we'd start seeing a rise in bombings instead of mass shootings. I don't know that we won't as it currently stands, either.

But between these two incidents, it's hard for me to understand how anyone could figure that gun control is the answer to our violent crime problems.