Kamala Harris loves to trot out her talking points about her gun control proposals in campaign appearances, which inevitably include her description of them as “common sense”. According to Harris, it’s just common sense to ban the most popular rifles in the country (though she’s now silent on whether its also common sense to include a compensated confiscation component to her gun ban scheme). It’s also common sense, at least to Harris, to mandate background checks on every private transfer of a firearm, even temporarily or if the seller is well aware that the buyer isn’t prohibited from possessing or purchasing a gun. 

Waiting periods? Common sense. Gun rationing laws? Common sense. Magazine bans? Common sense. Whatever a gun control activist is proposing, they’re sure to tell us that it’s only common sense. 

There is, however, one policy that seems perfectly reasonable to me (and I would argue, most Americans) that Democrats are largely unwilling to get behind: increasing the penalty for stealing a gun or possessing a stolen firearm. 

As Fox 45 in Baltimore reported this week, police have seized more than 1,600 guns this year, and many of them were reported stolen by their rightful owner. 

But as police snatch the guns off streets, some Maryland lawmakers–including Republican Delegate Robin Grammer of Baltimore County–believe so much more can be done when someone is caught with a stolen gun.

Grammer is among those lawmakers pushing to make possession of a stolen gun a felony.Currently in Maryland, the crime is only a misdemeanor.

“They’re misdemeanor cases, there are so many of them the prosecutor can only focus limited time, resources and efforts that they have and they give it to the big cases, not necessarily every misdemeanor,” Grammer said.”In terms of accountability, what you’re doing is, you’re taking people that are in possession of stolen firearms and you’re putting them right back on the streets.”

That sounds common-sensical to me, but Democrats have repeatedly balked at increasing the penalty for possessing a stolen firearm. For the past five years, bills that would make it a felony to be caught with a stolen gun have died at the hands of the Democratic majority in Annapolis, while a wave of new restrictions aimed at legal gun owners have been signed into law or adopted via an override after they were vetoed by then-Gov. Larry Hogan. 

It’s not just Maryland. Democrats in Colorado also voted down a bill that would have made it a felony to steal a gun. Under current law, the punishment for stealing a gun depends on how much it’s worth. Theft of a firearm with a value of less than $300 is a petty offense punishable by just ten days in jail. If a gun is valued between $301 and $1,999 the theft is considered a misdemeanor offense. Only when the firearm is worth $2,000 or more is the crime punishable as a felony. 

HB 1138 would have changed that by making it a Class 6 felony, punishable by up to 18 months in prison. With violent crime skyrocketing in Colorado over the past decade, you’d think that this would have been something both Republicans and Democrats could agree on, but though the bill was introduced with bipartisan support, the Democrat majority in the Colorado House nixed the bill  in committee. 

The increased penalties were estimated to cost the state an extra $1 million to imprison those convicted. That stoked concerns among the Democratic majority on the House Judiciary Committee about putting more people in prison, particularly people of color. 

To assuage those anxieties, the bill’s main sponsors, Democratic Rep. Marc Snyder of Manitou Springs and Republican Rep. Ryan Armagost of Berthoud, amended the measure during its first hearing on Feb. 14 to make it a Class 2 misdemeanor, punishable by up to 120 days in jail, to steal a firearm valued at less than $1,000. 

Snyder and Armagost hoped by taking the new felony offense off the table — and the prison term that accompanied it — the committee’s Democratic majority could be persuaded to advance the bill.

“Theft of firearms is an epidemic that tracks with our gun violence epidemic right now,” Snyder said. 

But watering down the bill didn’t work. 

“For me, just philosophically, it is hard for me to vote for any law that increases a criminal penalty without evidence that there’s a direct link to a deterrent effect — without evidence that we will see a decrease in people who are stealing firearms,” Rep. Javier Mabrey, a Denver Democrat on the committee, said during the bill’s first hearing.  

The direct link to deterrence is obvious: if someone’s in prison they’re not in a position to steal any more firearms. But most Democrats in the legislature are so concerned with criminals actually going to prison that HB 1138 couldn’t even make it to the House floor for a vote. Instead, they ended up approving a bill requiring gun owners to store guns in vehicles in a locked, hard-sided container out of sight or else face a fine. 

It’s nonsense, not common sense, to blame gun owners for the theft of their firearms while refusing to get tough on the thieves themselves, but that’s all a part of the Democrats’ playbook when it comes to gun laws: punish the lawful gun owner, while doing everything possible to help criminals avoid consequences for their actions.