A common refrain from gun rights advocates--common because it's true--is that gun control will work just as well as drug control has worked. After all, we just removed a dictator from Venezuela for his role in funneling cocaine into the United States. We're still fighting the Mexican cartels to try and keep them from funneling their products onto American streets, and we have the Chinese helping the fentanyl trade.
Drugs are all over the place, and despite being restricted even more tightly than guns are in many ways, we're not doing a lot to stop the problem.
And anyone with half a brain would recognize that the means for distributing drugs and for distributing illegal guns aren't any different. In fact, a guy in Scotland just illustrated exactly how that might work here based on what he reportedly did in the heavily gun-controlled UK.
A criminal who used encrypted messaging to act as a "facilitator for illegal drugs and firearms" has been jailed.
Allan Hughes, 30, from Clydebank in West Dunbartonshire, Scotland, filmed himself with deadly firearms he was attempting to sell, sparking a major investigation by the Organised Crime Partnership, made up of the National Crime Agency (NCA) and Police Scotland.
Hughes, who used the nickname "Ali G", was arrested in June 2024 when he and another person exchanged packages containing £15,000 in cash and half a kilo of heroin. One month earlier, officers had seized a number of his devices, uncovering on one of them thousands of messages on encrypted platforms, along with images and videos of firearms, ammunition and drugs, all intended for sale.
He later pleaded guilty to a charge of being involved in serious organised crime at the High Court in Glasgow in November 2025. Today (January 8), Hughes was sentenced to six years and nine months in prison at the same court and will be subject to a Serious Crime Prevention Order (SCPO) for three years. He is already serving time for other drug-related offences.
Facilitator of drugs and firearms
Philip Marshall, Regional Head of Investigations at the NCA, said: "Allan Hughes was a facilitator for illegal drugs and firearms with direct involvement in the sale and movement of these illegal commodities.
Shocking, right?
Yeah, not really. This is pretty much exactly what would happen here if we suddenly banned guns and deluded ourselves into thinking that now criminals couldn't get them. They get drugs easily enough, and everyone in the inner cities knows who peddles what, so guns would be just that simple to get, too.
The only thing is that then, regular folks wouldn't be able to get them and use them to defend themselves from the zombies that would take our stuff and our lives just to get their next fix.
Hughes seems to provide a one-stop shop for his alleged customers, where they can get not just that fix, but the weapons needed to get the one after that.
Look, someone will come back and say that the UK has a lower violent crime rate than the US and therefore I'm wrong. Well, I'm not, because they had a lower violent crime rate than we did before they banned firearms. They have a lower total homicide rate than our "non-gun" homicide rate. Those rates are largely meaningless because the nations are so different.
And I suspect that, with the influx of immigrants who have no interest in becoming British, that'll be changing significantly in the next few years.
Regardless, Hughes is standing accused of providing both guns and drugs. Both are illegal in the UK, yet he had access.
Can anyone really convince me that if we somehow enacted a ban here, it would be different? Really? We have more guns than people already, and even if you tried to take them away from law-abiding citizens, you still end up armed criminals who aren't giving them up, no matter what, and those would still be numbered in the millions.
Give it up. Criminals break laws, and that includes gun laws. Stop pretending otherwise just to interfere with our right to keep and bear arms.
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