The gun debate revolves around two basic ideas. One is that gun control is not just an infringement on our rights but that it doesn’t work. The other is pretty much the opposite of that.
Those who favor gun control routinely claim that restricting the law-abiding has some kind of impact on criminal behavior, that if you limit guns for regular folks, criminals will effectively be disarmed.
Yet the truth is that criminals have all kinds of ways to get guns. So long as you have a semi-free society, there will be those who work to find a way through the system for any illegal good. Yes, that includes guns.
But what if we took away all freedom? What if we turned our cities into literal prisons, the kind you’d need Snake Plissken to get into and out of? Then we could stop guns from ending up in criminal hands, right?
Well, probably not since we can’t seem to guarantee guns won’t get into actual prisons.
A Georgia inmate somehow got hold of a gun and shot dead a prison kitchen employee before turning the weapon on himself, according to officials.
Jaydrekus Hart, who was facing at least another 19 years in Smith State Prison for voluntary manslaughter, gunned down kitchen worker Aureon Shavea Grace at around 4:30 a.m. Sunday, the state’s Department of Corrections said.
The agency provided few details, including how Hart got the weapon or why he targeted the kitchen worker, who was identified by friends as a 24-year-old mom.
“The weapon is in GDC custody at this time, and a complete and thorough investigation of what led up to this tragic incident will be carried out,” the prison department said.
This is the second homicide this year at Smith State Prison, but the previous attack involved a homemade weapon, which is the usual tool for murder inside a prison.
Yet Hart had a gun.
Somehow, despite all the security involved in getting into and out of a prison, he got his hands on a firearm, was able to hide it for God only knows how long, then used it to shoot a kitchen worker before turning the gun on himself.
How?
It’s unlikely a worker in the prison brought it in for him, though I suppose it’s possible. So who handed him the gun? How did he get it?
More importantly for our purposes here, how are we supposed to believe that gun control works when it can’t even keep guns out of a state prison?
The short answer is that you can’t. Notoriously anti-gun cities can’t, anti-gun states can’t, anti-gun nations can’t, and now we see even prisons can’t keep them out.
It’s well past time to abandon this idea that gun control can do anything and start focusing on finding a solution that will actually work, preferably without finding a new way to infringe on people’s rights.
Of course, that doesn’t matter if some people work extremely hard to be oblivious to the reality. Assuming, of course, they’re actually oblivious versus willfully ignoring it. I think I know where I’ll put my money on that.
