As if we weren't already aware of the futility of gun-control laws, now out of Massachusetts — a state which, by the way, has some of the strictest gun laws in the republic — a man legally barred from owning firearms obtained a 3D printer and started making his own. This should come as a surprise to no one.

A Massachusetts man was prohibited from having guns. However, the Kingston Police Department said he was caught using a 3D printer to make them. 

On Saturday, Charles Santos, 34, of Kingston was arrested and charged with unlawful possession of a large capacity firearm, possess ammunition without FID card and possess class E drug.

While executing a search warrant on Howland’s Lane, police found Santos had a fully operational AR-style rifle, various firearms accessories, a 3D printer, 3D printed firearms parts, body armor and steroids.

It's unclear how Santos obtained the 3D printer, but that's neither here nor there; one can pick up an inexpensive 3D printer on Amazon, and the plans for printing, say, an AR-15 lower receiver (the part that is serialized and considered a "firearm" by BATFE) are ubiquitous. Further, it's not only the receivers that the gun-grabbers are after, and some of the "dangerous" accessories would also be easy to fabricate.

The problem here is simple, and it's not new; 3D printing makes the fabrication of improvised firearms easier, but it never was particularly difficult. Guns are not terribly complex pieces of machinery, and one of the easiest firearms to fabricate in a basement or garage machine shop is a short, powerful, open-bolt sub-machine gun. The U.S. military had one such from WW2 through most of the Cold War, the M3 "Grease Gun," which was easy, cheap, and quick to make in large numbers.

Just for a moment — and I still think an action this drastic is (as yet) unlikely — consider the possibility of a complete confiscation of all guns – imagine someone had the ability to snap their fingers and poof every firearm out of existence.

How long do you think it would take for a robust black market to crop up? I’m guessing a matter of hours.

Now, consider the likely consequences of that. There’s a reason that Second Amendment advocates are fond of saying, “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” Two aspects of that would derive here; first, criminals would be armed not with crappy, cheap Hi-Points but with small, cheap, concealable sub-machine guns, like the M3 Grease Gun in the video above. Second, many law-abiding citizens would become non-law-abiding as they seek their own bathtub-gin arms to make up for the sudden disadvantage.

It's not hard to picture what happens next; these kinds of situations tend to escalate. Throw in some big blue city prosecutors and judges who favor criminals over citizens, and you've got chaos.

Prohibition didn't work with booze, and it won't work with guns.

Now, with this arrest making the news, no doubt the gun-grabbing cartels will be shouting about the need to restrict 3D printers and the patterns required to make gun parts. That is, to put a point on it, impotent. One doesn't need a 3D printer to make a cheap sub-machine gun, and once the patterns for those parts are on the internet, there's no squelching them. As many of us mature types are fond of pointing out, the internet is forever. The 3D genie is out of the bottle. Nothing BATFE or any other agency can do will put that genie back in place.

The nation seems an increasingly dangerous place these last few weeks, and increasingly, people are seeking to arm themselves against it. It is perhaps belaboring the obvious to point out that it would be more fruitful to attempt criminal control or how to deal with people with known mental-health issues than gun control, but these days, those points tend to fall on deaf ears.