Gun control failure is an inevitable part of life, as it would be under any other prohibitionist scheme. If you type “Sweden grenade attack” into a search engine, you will get a stark picture of what a world where handguns are just as punitively barred from import as RPG rockets looks like. After all, if you’re going to get the same amount of jail time for a .22 as you are for a frag grenade, why not go for the gusto? Like any prohibition scheme restricting import, production, sale, ownership and use of something that is still desired by a significant portion of the populace, there will be criminals who get around it, and make an excellent living doing so selling to that now black market.
So when California –the shining city on a hill of anti-gun lobbyists– experiences a series of deadly gun violence incidents, it garners some criticism for the regimes that have been put in place there were promised to eliminate the possibility of such things. Indeed, the favored gore scoreboard of the left, The Gun Violence Archive’s Mass Shooting Tracker claims that since Jan 6, there have been 9 “mass shootings” in the state. Californians were promised that they were giving up their freedom to keep and bear arms for the safety that would come with a dearth of weaponry, which of course has clearly resulted only in more inevitable gun control failure.
Instead of recognizing this, California blames the states around it with looser regulations. Instead of acknowledging that, as the war on drugs is winding down, they are ramping up a war on guns to replace it, they double down on authority and restriction that is doomed to failure. After all, if gun control dictated per capita violent crime rates, California wouldn’t rank higher than Mississippi.