A popular NRA talking point is that gun laws cannot work because criminals won’t follow them. As Marco Rubio often proclaimed during the primary campaign: “My skepticism about gun laws is criminals don’t follow the law.”

Applying this logic, why have any laws? If criminals are just going to run red lights, why have traffic penalties? The NRA’s reasoning is a prescription for chaos — and it doesn’t withstand contact with empirical reality.

In the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, federal legislation made it more difficult for consumers to obtain bomb-making ingredients and easier for law enforcement to monitor purchases. This new oversight led terrorists to revamp their tactics, replacing bombs with guns. An investigation by the Trace revealed that 95% of terrorism deaths in the U.S. between January 2002 and August 2015 were caused by firearms.

—Armed with Reason