British Teen Getting Gun Shows Gaping Hole In Strict Gun Control System

British gun control is notoriously restrictive. Law-abiding citizens in most places there can’t get a gun to save their lives. Literally. It’s just not feasible.

And, of course, some people want the exact same system here.

I’ve highlighted a lot of cases that show the system doesn’t work as advertised, and a lot of the time it’s just criminals getting guns. It’s like here. You’re not going to stop bad actors, especially when they’re willing to buy guns via the black market.

But this story caught my eye, because man, does it make the whole British gun control system look terrible.

A “major system failure” in gun laws has been exposed by the way triple murderer Nicholas Prosper was able to buy a shotgun using a fake licence, the Home Secretary has been told.

Bedfordshire Police and Crime Commissioner John Tizard has written to Yvette Cooper calling for urgent reform, after a court heard how the teenager was able to buy a shotgun and 100 cartridges after contacting a legitimate seller online.

After he was sentenced to life with a minimum term of 49 years on Wednesday, Downing Street said the Government is “urgently looking” at how controls can be tightened in the private sale of firearms.

A Number 10 spokesman said: “The case has exposed some deep and long-standing weaknesses in the private sale of firearms and we are urgently looking at how we can tighten these controls.”

Prosper learned enough about clay pigeon shooting to convince the vendor he had a real interest in the sport, and met him in the car park near the flat he shared with his family in Luton, Bedfordshire, last year, where he paid £650 for the weapon and ammunition.

Less than 24 hours later he used it to murder his mother, brother and sister, and had planned to carry out a school shooting.

Under British law, a vendor has 7 days to notify police of a firearm sale. The seller here did so by 5:30 PM the day of the sale, but it still did nothing at all to prevent the murder.

And with the kind of thing kids in my day got so we could buy beer.

Obviously, this twerp had bigger plans than just killing his family–something many potential mass killers do because they think they’re protecting the family from the shame of having a mass murderer as a relative, apparently–but that never materialized. Thank God.

One unfortunate impact of this, beyond the loss of innocent life, is the fact that now the rules will get tightened in England yet again, all while a teenager was able to navigate the system that’s already one of the toughest in the world and would likely get past any additional rules, too.

I’m sorry, but this is really just evidence that no matter what you do, some enterprising soul will figure out a way around the system. This time, it was with something as simple as a fake ID. I’m pretty sure that happens here in the United States more often than we’d like to think, too.

Gun control will never stop the motivated bad guy.

It just stops regular people.