Maryland has some pretty strict gun control laws. Maybe not as bad as California or New Jersey, among others, but bad enough, especially if you're stuck living there.

And gun control advocates, as we all know, will swear on a stack of Bibles that gun control works.

Of course, we know how honest that bunch tends to be.

They'll make a sleezy used car salesman look as honest as they come.

Still, they keep saying it.

So, if Maryland has all these gun control laws and those laws really work, how in the hell did this one happen?

 gun discharged in a student's backpack in a classroom at Billingsley Elementary School in Charles County on Thursday, Charles County Public Schools confirmed to 7News Maryland Bureau Chief Brad Bell.

...

"One of our school resource officers was actually standing outside that classroom and immediately entered along with the teacher already in there, and they discovered a student reached into their bookbag and there was a loaded gun in the bookbag, and apparently, while the student was reportedly retrieving a paper, the gun discharged. The projectile went down toward the ground, so nobody was injured," said Charles County Sheriff Spokesperson Diane Richardson. "We’re looking into the possibility the student got the gun from a relative, but we still have to confirm that. And secondly, we’re trying to determine how this child got the gun, where was it when it got in their possession? So those are questions that we’re trying to find the answers."

No one was hurt and the kid said he had no intention of harming anyone.

In other words, he had the gun because he thought it was cool. He probably planned to show it off to his friends, then take it home and put it back where he found it.

However, the problem with his plan is that kids are generally stupid, particularly about firearms, and he pulled something stuck in the trigger guard and BANG!

Obviously, this is being looked into, but let's understand something here and now.

This isn't the result of insufficient gun control laws. This isn't even really a case of the laws on the books being disobeyed for whatever reason, though that likely didn't help.

No, this comes from the demonization of firearms.

What happens we get kids who have been told their whole life that guns are bad by most authority figures in their lives--their teachers, the school resource officers, the television shows they watch, the works--and that leads them to see it as forbidden. Kids have a profound tendency to touch anything you tell them not to touch. I remember some of my friends in elementary school smoking. Others were fooling around with the opposite sex, all because they'd been told not to.

Yes, there needs to be boundaries for children, but demonizing something as dangerous as guns just makes it cooler in their minds. Since they also tend to lack any understanding or familiarity with these things, they don't understand why people are demonizing it.

So, because guns are treated as the worst evil since someone decided the best way to teach kids to love to read is to make them read the most boring books imaginable, you've got kids thinking of guns as cool, but no real appreciation for what they can do.

Take away the forbidden factor, at least to a reasonable degree, and stuff like this isn't as likely to happen.