Guns For Mexico

Gun ban won't stop Mexican drug wars

Sid Salter • ssalter@clarionledger.com • April 19
Congressional Democrats, Obama administration Cabinet members, the Mexican government and no small segment of the American media continue to argue in lamenting the ongoing Mexican drug cartel wars that 90 percent of the weapons used to commit crimes in Mexico come from the U.S.
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That out-of-context contention has been debunked. In context, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told Congress that in 2007-2008, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. About 6,000 were successfully traced. Of the 6,000 guns traced, 5,114 or 90 percent were traced to the U.S.
Rest of the story

But the rest of the story is that the Mexican government has reported that a total of some 29,000 weapons have been actually been recovered at Mexican crime scenes over that same period. Including all those weapons - not just the ones traced by the ATF - 83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico were not traced to the U.S.

That fact hasn't stopped the notion of an "iron river of guns" flowing from the U.S. south to Mexico becoming part of the national debate. Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder and a number of other prominent Democratic surrogates have revived talk of renewing the Clinton administration assault weapons ban.

In 1994, Congress approved a decade-long ban on the sale and possession of automatic and semi-automatic weapons, or so-called assault weapons. It expired in September 2004.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell was the latest to join the chorus calling to reimplement the assault weapons ban 11 days after three Pittsburgh police officers were killed by a man with an AK-47.
River of guns?

The notion that taking gun rights away from Americans will somehow stop drug violence in Mexico is absurd. Absurd, too, is the notion that either Mexican drug lords or the aberrant lone gunman in America will be deterred from buying automatic or semi-automatic weapons by a renewal of the Clinton-era gun ban is also absurd.

Under such a renewed ban, Mexican drug lords will simply continue to buy assault weapons on the black market or import them from Russia, China, Spain, South Korea, Guatemala or other willing sellers and go right on killing each other and innocents as well. More U.S. gun control isn't the answer to Mexico's drug violence problems.

Thought this was an interesting comment on gun control in the United States. This
should be good fodder for 'the boys.'