When people ask how criminals get their hands on guns, we know what they want to hear is a story that will justify some new gun law. At least, that’s the way things generally go in such discussion. If they’re not rabidly anti-gun, they’re hoping they’ll hear a way that will let them stop criminals from getting guns without impacting law-abiding gun owners. Unfortunately, that’s fairly rare.

Yet if people want to know how criminals get guns, they only have to look at people like this.

A Chicago man was sentenced to four and a half years in federal prison for illegally buying handguns in Indiana and selling them in the city. Ricky Hatchet, 25, bought the guns from an unlicensed individual in a Bloomington on three separate occasions in 2015, according to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Norther District of Illinois. Hatch, who is also known as “Rick Hatchet” and “Ricky Hatchet,” recruited someone from Indianapolis to serve as the buyer in the initial sale, prosecutors said. The seller reviewed the person’s driver’s license and listed some of her information on a purported bill of sale before selling the guns to Hatch, who paid for them in cash. Hatch used aliases to conceal his identity in the other two transactions, prosecutors said. After buying the guns, Hatch brought them to Chicago, prosecutors said. Chicago Police ultimately recovered five of the guns from other people.

Let’s look at how this happened. We have a straw purchase (which is illegal), false information being used on a Form 4473 (also illegal), and transporting guns across state lines for the purposes of selling them (which is, you guessed it, illegal). Pretty much every rule designed to stop this kind of behavior was broken, and this doesn’t even touch on the Illinois laws broken with these sales.

In other words, despite numerous laws designed to prevent criminals from getting their hands on firearms, they still got them.

It’s almost like gun laws don’t actually stop criminals from breaking the law to get their hands on guns. Shocking, right? It’s like you just can’t find a law-abiding criminal these days.

This is how I know the gun grabbers won’t stop until they figure out how to ban guns completely. Because that’s about the only way you’re going to stop these kinds of transactions from happening. It won’t stop criminals from getting guns, mind you, but it’ll stop this particular path for them getting guns.

The number of laws Hatch broke in this scheme tells you that so long as people can legally acquire guns, there will be people who break the law in order to get them for nefarious purposes. As we’ve seen in places like the U.K. and Australia, even gun bans don’t even stop criminals from getting the guns.

Nothing will.

Instead, it makes more sense to empower the law-abiding. Allow people to own guns, buy them as they wish, and make it too risky to engage in violent crime. If you do that, then it won’t matter if criminals have guns or not. After all, if they’re afraid to use them, it’s the same thing as them not having them in the first place.