Saturday, March 28, 2009

Tradin' violations...

...of the Constitution, maybe?...

A $700 million initiative to strengthen the U.S. role in the fight against Mexican drug cartels will place Houston at the center of efforts to shut down gunrunning to Mexico, federal officials said.
The Obama administration this week announced a multi-agency effort to assist Mexico’s battle against warring drug cartels by adding hundreds of agents to gun-running units, drug intelligence groups and task forces aimed at fighting kidnapping and public corruption.
The initiative places new agents in Houston to quickly expand Project Gunrunner, a federal effort to staunch the illegal flow of guns into Mexico. A “large majority” of 100 federal gun agents being transferred to the border region in the next 45 days will be assigned to monitor purchases at the 1,500 gun stores in the Houston area, a federal official confirmed.

I guess this could be better than something like an "assault weapons" ban, which of course is a blatant violation of the Second Amendment, but it still leaves the door open to effective violations of other amendments to the Bill of Rights, namely the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, such as happened after a Virginia gun show a few years back. Of course we all know the likelihood is very high of the administration coming back and trying again for that ban...just like the scorpion has to sting, and the fish has to swim, the Marxists we elected have to try their damnedest to take the guns out of the hands of the citizenry. It's just what they do. I do hope the Republicans and the Blue Dog Dems hold the line on their refusal to vote for such a ban, and remind the advocates of such a ban how things went the last time they put through something like that, but we'll see how that one goes.
On a related note, we have this...
A gun trafficker convicted of buying weapons in Houston to arm Mexican drug cartels was sentenced Friday to four years in prison — a forewarning of the U.S. government’s escalating war on narco-violence.
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said Juan Pablo Gutierrez was a “prolific” purchaser among a group of 23 arms traffickers who bought at least 339 firearms for Mexican organized crime syndicates in 2006 and 2007.
...
Adler, Gutierrez’s lawyer, said it was time to do more than just look at his client if the U.S. government wants to get serious about weapons going to Mexico.
“Somehow the guns stores, and the gun shows, and the gun manufacturers, are the ones the government should be looking at to formulate a solution,” he said.

Huh. Now it's those damned American gun manufacturers and damned American gun stores to blame, too. I don't guess I am really so surprised, as that's really just the logical extension of blaming the damned American gun shows...