Yep, just more of the same, from this morning's Chron...
WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama promised Mexican President Felipe Calderon during a summit Monday that the U.S. would take stronger action to stem the flow of weapons smuggled from Texas and other border states to drug lords in Mexico.
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Mexican officials estimated that 90 percent of the guns smuggled into their country come across the U.S. border and have been complaining loudly for years about the unimpeded flow.
...In the 25 months since Calderon took office, Mexican troops and police have seized more than 28,000 guns, including 15,000 automatic rifles, as well as 3 million rounds of ammunition and nearly 2,000 hand grenades.
Authorities have also captured rocket-propelled grenades and launchers, anti-tank weapons and specialized .50-caliber rifles used for sniping.
“The drug traffickers wouldn’t be so dangerous if they weren’t able to buy these weapons from the United States,’’ said Felipe Gonzalez, chairman of the Mexican Senate’s Public Security Committee.
Once again, we see nothing about where the money's coming from with which the drug lords finance their murderous enterprise, nothing about taking the obscene profits out of the drug enterprise, just more of the same old smoke and mirrors, the same old cock-and-bull story about how it's those "damned American gun shows" that are to blame. As for RPGs and anti-tank weapons, once again, I have seen nothing of the sort in any gun store I've been to here on the upper Texas Gulf Coast. And if I remember correctly, undercover ATF agents are at most gun shows making sure there isn't any such weaponry being sold at the gun shows. (Not that I think this in any way justifies the existence of the ATF, as I think their existence is more or less just more of the "mowing the weed" variety of problem solving, as opposed to "pulling the weed up from the root.") Now that I think about it, though, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they included the .50BMGs as "anti-tank weapons," as officials have made plenty other preposterous claims about what .50s are capable of. And if the folks pulling the triggers for the cartels are so experienced they can snipe from whatever range with the .50, I don't think they'd have any problems doing their dirty work with any other hunting calibers like the .30-06, 7mm Magnum or .308. And all this is "change we can believe in," eh? I must be missing something...because to me it just looks like more of the same.
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