I was going to take today off, but I just caught two things on the news.
First off, reporst indicate that Richard Phillips was freed by a team of Navy Seals around 13:30EDT. Three pirates are reported dead, and one wounded. I’m glad to hear it, and I hope this sparks an initiative to arm our sailors from now on.
It also occurs to me that an American maritime vessel was taken by pirates for the first time in almost 200 years, and the President has remained mute on the issue. Same as with the North Korean missile launch last week. Mark my words, this administration will be known for its foreign policy failures more than any other issue in the balance of history.
The second thing was an interview with Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan, in which he revived the myth that 90% of weapons confiscated in warfare between Mexican law enforcement and drug dealers (who are often one and the same) come from American dealers.
Sure, blame us for your problems. Is it our fault that Mexico has spent the last 50 years collapsing into barbarism and corruption, that their policies have so utterly failed that the national pastime is crossing the border to live off the radar in the United States? Exactly how does the United States gain from absorbing violent crime and fraud in the healthcare and educational systems?
When I first heard the “Myth of 90%,” I was skeptical. I know folks who’ve lived and worked in Mexico. They’ve got serious gun control laws down there, but it doesn’t prevent people from getting them anyway. In fact, the culture is so violent that even the most meek and law-abiding procure weapons illegally.
As one acquaintance put it, you’re already breaking the law by having a gun at all, so why screw around with a pistol? Why stop with a semiautomatic rifle? I’ve heard from several people that fully-automatic M16’s, FAL’s and AK-47’s are commonplace among regular citizens. Grenades are reported to be easier to procure than antibiotics in many areas.
And those guns don’t come from licensed FFL’s. Contrary to popular belief, there are very few machine guns in civilian hands in this country, and the ones that do exist are carefully registered and tracked. The “assault rifles” you can buy over the counter in the United States are semiautomatic rifles, which require a pull on the trigger once for each shot. Essentially, they are short-range, low-powered carbines with large magazines. They’re good weapons for target shooting and home defense, but hardly the first choice for deployment in military or large-scale violent criminal operations.
So, where are these guns coming from? To quote Jeunesse and Lott:
— The Black Market. Mexico is a virtual arms bazaar, with fragmentation grenades from South Korea, AK-47s from China, and shoulder-fired rocket launchers from Spain, Israel and former Soviet bloc manufacturers.
— Russian crime organizations. Interpol says Russian Mafia groups such as Poldolskaya and Moscow-based Solntsevskaya are actively trafficking drugs and arms in Mexico.
– South America. During the late 1990s, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) established a clandestine arms smuggling and drug trafficking partnership with the Tijuana cartel, according to the Federal Research Division report from the Library of Congress.
— Asia. According to a 2006 Amnesty International Report, China has provided arms to countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Chinese assault weapons and Korean explosives have been recovered in Mexico.
— The Mexican Army. More than 150,000 soldiers deserted in the last six years, according to Mexican Congressman Robert Badillo. Many took their weapons with them, including the standard issue M-16 assault rifle made in Belgium.
So, where does the 90% figure come from? It comes from traces the ATF does on guns which are recovered and submitted for investigation. The Mexican government isn’t going to bother sending back guns that obviously originated elsewhere, or on which the serial numbers have been defaced. They only do so if it appears that the gun originated in America.
So, an American gun gets sent back, and the trace reveals that it came from the United States. The statistic in question proves only that 90% of American guns come from America. As for the other 10%, well…I’m scratching my head, too. The salient fact is that this statistic does not in any way indicate what percentage of all weapons being used in Mexico actually come from America, nor how they got there.
There’s no point in submitting an Israeli Galil, a Chinese AK-47 or a Vektor carbine from South Africa, but find an old 5-shot S&W Chief’s Special (which has probably passed through innumerable owners at that point) on the body of a drug dealer, and that’s proof that American gun dealers are involved in a sinister plot to fuel open warfare in Mexico.
It makes no sense for the cartels to purchase weapons from American dealers. Think through the hypothetical process:
- Find and recruit a straw buyer in the States who is assured of passing a background check
- Pay $500-1500 per unit for a less-lethal rifle
- Arrange for transportation of said rifle across national borders, at huge expense and risk.
That, or they can buy fully automatic rifles from a wheelbarrow in an alley three blocks away, without any of those issues. I may not be a big-time drug lord, but I’m smart enough to know which I’d choose.
Yep, welcome to the gun control debate. The Left will twist any random factoid they can to the point of incomprehensibility just to prove that all the world’s problems are our fault, and that most of those problems are the result of allowing the law-abiding to own firearms in accordance with the 2nd Amendment.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s Easter, and I’m going back to watching MST3K.