Sunday, November 30, 2008

Bend over, indeed...

because, yep, here it comes again...

Drug cartel gangsters waging a criminal insurgency against Mexican society and government are making the Houston area their marketplace of choice, as they spend millions of dollars statewide buying military-style weapons and ammunition.
Gangsters have honed in on this city because of its glut of gun shops, its proximity to the border, and its long-established networks for smuggling narcotics into the United States, federal law-enforcement officials said.
The surge in fraudulent purchases comes as more than 4,000 people have died in Mexico's criminal underworld violence this year.
Authorities can point to numerous crimes, including the infamous 2007 Acapulco Massacre to illustrate the carnage brought on by Houston-bought guns that have gotten into the hands of ruthless killers.
...
To help Mexico keep drugs out of the United States, the U.S. government needs to increase the number of federal agents fighting weapons trafficking, Sarukhan said, and to develop better intelligence as to who's buying the guns, where they're buying them and where they're taking them.
The number of ATF agents assigned to the Houston region, which stretches from near Del Rio to the Gulf Coast, has increased 12 percent in the past two years.
Current interpretations of the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to bear arms, make such investigations difficult, agents said. Federal law prohibits the government from having a long-term database of weapons or ammunition purchasers.

Whoa, did you catch that last part? To help Mexico keep DRUGS out of the United States, the GUN trafficking methods need to be beefed up. Nothing about tighter border security to keep better track of what's going into and coming out of Mexico or to keep the guns on this side and the drugs on that side, and nothing about taking the stratospheric profits (and thus, the incentive to get them here) out of the drugs themselves. As one of the commenters said, funny how the Chron spins the story to make the gun stores the problem and not the illegal immigrants (or, for that matter, the porous border). I see that Carter's Country, Academy and the other stores in Houston were mentioned as having done nothing wrong here, and in any event, from what I understand the FFLs as a group tend to police themselves pretty stringently anyway. And, of course, if the damn Mexican government officials would pull their heads out of their asses and recognize their own citizens' natural, God-given right of self-defense with the best tools available, the illegal gun problem, well, it wouldn't be as much of a problem. (And don't you love how the reporters point to the Constitution as making the fix more difficult?) Mother Nature abhors a vacuum, friends, and the phenomenon written about here is just another illustration of the fact that she will NOT be denied. And it's also yet more proof that, as long as you have a War On Drugs, you will have a War On Guns. You cannot have the first without having the second. It really is just that simple, and it's a lesson we should have learned with the failed Prohibition experiment back in the 1920s and 1930s. And I know what's going to follow in the pages of the Chron — in fact, I'd lay money on it. Mark my words, to follow this story will be another Chron editorial advocating the passage of another semiautomatic rifle ban, this time with teeth, under the guise of "being a good neighbor" and "helping our friends south of the Rio Grande fight the scourge of illegal drugs and gun violence." Nothing about tightening the borders, nothing about our insane drug laws, nothing about Mexico's insane gun laws. Nope, just as it's always been, it's going to be about OUR guns and OUR right to keep them being infringed upon.