California’s gun control laws are the toughest in the nation. According to supporters, they keep bad people from getting guns, which must be why the violent crime rates in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland are exactly described as “low,” much less “impressively low.”

But these laws work, we’re told.

The reason I don’t buy it is that such thinking, if we can call it that, is predicated on the idea that criminals won’t look for some other way to accomplish what they want. At best, they’ll use another weapon as needed. Most of the time, though, they break gun laws in a variety of ways.

For example, this enterprising moron. (Allegedly)

A Roseville man was charged Tuesday with owning, manufacturing and selling illegal assault weapons after regulators overheard him trying to sell a silencer at the Placerville Gun Show in November, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced. 

Marc Berman was charged with 17 counts of violating firearms laws in Placer Superior Court, along with four additional counts in El Dorado Superior Court, the two criminal complaints, dated Feb. 6, show. 

State special agents and the Roseville Police SWAT team raided Berman’s home on Nov. 12, seizing eight assault rifles and a silencer, Bonta said in a news release. They also found “numerous other handguns, rifles, disassembled rifles, firearm parts, large capacity magazines, and rounds of ammunition,” Bonta said. 

State prosecutors allege that Berman was manufacturing and assembling the weapons in his garage, and then selling them at gun shows.

Of course, officials tried to say that these laws are meant to keep people safe, etc.

They’re not. On some level, they should be able to see that, at best, these laws have absolutely no impact on criminals.

Criminals will never obey the law. They’re not going to decide to walk the straight and narrow just because a law stopped them from getting a gun legally. If they were interested in obeying the law, those prohibiting things like robbery and murder would be sufficient.

Plus, let’s keep in mind that this is California we’re talking about. This guy was allegedly selling illegally manufactured guns at gun shows, while California has universal background checks. He was talking to someone about suppressors publicly. If this is happening, then it shatters all of those gun control laws.

After all, the law prohibits any such thing. 

But we’ve always noted that one of the issue with trying to make it about gun shows is that most of the people selling firearms are licensed dealers and are conducting background checks anyway, but the so-called “loophole” was really just a face-to-face transfer by non-dealers. Try and focus on gun shows and these sales would just move to the parking lot, so to speak.

It seems likely that Berman was making connections at the show, then selling elsewhere, just as we said would happen.

The difference is that there is a universal background check law in place that did less than nothing.

You’re shocked, right? Yeah, me neither.

California’s gun control laws aren’t about keeping criminals disarmed. They’re about keeping everyone else in the state disarmed.