One of the things President Joe Biden has worked hard to implement and that Vice President Kamala Harris will try to put in place as well should she win next week is a universal background check law. This, we’re told, is essential if we’re to curb the flow of guns into criminal hands. 

After all, if every gun buyer anywhere in the nation has to undergo a background check, convicted felons aren’t going to be able to buy them.

That makes a lost of sense. At least, it does until you finish the second grade and realize that this assumes that everyone is going to follow the law while they’re trying to break the law.

Yes, that’s really what it does.

It basically assumes that everyone will conduct a transaction as if everyone is law-abiding rather than some people simply buying guns from those who don’t care about such things.

“Yeah, then how will those people get guns?” someone might ask, probably with a lot of bluster thinking they’ve landed a “gotcha” on me. In reply, I’ll just point this story out to them.

Two men are under arrest and accused of crashing a stolen vehicle into two stores and stealing guns early Monday.

Cincinnati, Cheviot and Green Township police all responded about 1:15 a.m. to a pawn shop called American Trading Company on Harrison Avenue.

They found a stolen blue Hyundai crashed through the front entrance of the business, which is a federal firearms license dealer, court records show.

Police say 20-year-old Jahrion Kerkula and 18-year-old Wayne Griffiths, along with a third suspect, ran inside the pawn shop, smashed display cases and stole guns.

The store manager was there at the time and fired eight shots from an AK-47 rifle at the suspects, police wrote in court documents.

The three men ran from the store, taking six guns with them.

This isn’t anything new. I’ve seen dozens, if not hundreds of similar reports from all over the nation. Someone steals a car then uses it to crash into a gun store. They then take as many guns as they can, then take off, usually hopping into another car and making their escape.

This time, the manager was there and was armed. Usually, he’s not.

That means they usually get more than six guns.

Now, tell me how universal background checks are going to stop this. How are universal background checks going to stop people like this from stealing guns, either from gun stores or from law-abiding gun owners, and selling them to their criminal buddies?

The short answer is that it can’t. It’s never going to happen. It’s not physically possible. If it were, we’d have applied that to literally every other thing that gets stolen, up to and including money. If rich bankers can’t get the government to do something to make bank robbery and embezzlement impossible, what are they going to do to stop gun thefts?

Universal background check laws–or any background check law–sound good only for as long as it takes for you to realize that criminals aren’t even fazed by the requirements. They just get them through some other means, including crashing through a store wall to steal them.