Over and over again, I see someone say that the key to stopping so-called gun violence in our inner cities is more gun control. They figure that if we have to have a license to buy a gun, somehow that will inhibit the criminally-minded among us or something, or they think that if we’re required to go through a licensed dealer for all of our face-to-face sales, bad guys will be stuck without a firearm.

I won’t pretend that no one would ever be foiled with such regulations, at least in the short-term, but most criminals don’t get their guns like that. Straw purchases account for only a small number of illegal guns. Criminals who are able to buy them lawfully account for an even smaller number. Remarkably few come from face-to-face transfers, either.

No, they get them through stuff like this:

Federal authorities say the heist was the first in a series that netted the thieves more than 300 guns, which were then sold on the black market.

Six men have since been charged with conspiracy to steal firearms from the premises of a federal firearms licensee, the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles announced Tuesday. The targeted businesses were in Ventura, Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties, with the most recent incident reported Saturday at Fowler Gun Room in Orange, where 70 firearms were stolen.

Those arrested were Cross Arjay Goree, 18, of Lake Elsinore; Caine Aiden Goree, 22, of Lake Elsinore; Kenneth Gilmore III, 19, of Las Vegas; Brendan Markel Hawkins, 19, of Lake Elsinore; Calvin Logan Gray, 18, of Murrieta; and Kendall Eric Johnson, 23, of Lake Elsinore. 

The men are suspected of burglarizing or attempting to burglarize nine stores, each time using stolen vehicles to ram into the storefronts, smashing display cases and fleeing with firearms in other stolen cars.

Wait, doesn’t that sound a little familiar?

Maybe that’s because I wrote about a similar set of heists in Ohio just last night.

See, stealing a car isn’t all that difficult. People have been doing that ever since cars first became a thing, pretty much. The criminal underclass is filled with people who know how to do that, and some morons make it easy on them by not even locking their doors.

So they steal a car, and since it’s not theirs, they don’t worry about the damage from smashing through the wall. What’s more, thanks to social media and the fact that there are so many ironic images of people who did just that but into, say, a driving school or a brake repair shop, people know it can be done. So, they have an easy way to gain access to a gun store.

They don’t exactly need to be Thomas Crown to make that happen.

And this, boys and girls, is how criminals get guns. Some enterprising soul decides to steal a buttload of them, sell them to their fellow low-lives, and then we get armed criminals.

What laws, pray tell, would prevent this? I ask because if we’re supposed to believe that restricting our ability to buy and sell guns lawfully will impact criminals, then they have to somehow have an impact on this kind of thing, too, and I fail to see how that would work.

Maybe that’s because it doesn’t?

You know, just to put that out there.