By GI Korea on June 26th, 2011 at 8:42 am

90% of Firearms Used By Mexican Drug Cartels Does Not Come From America

• kushibo
  2:15 pm on June 26th, 2011 1

  I understand the gripe about how that statistic is used (it’s 87% of the weapons that various Mexican authorities tried to have traced and that the ATF was in fact able to trace), but even if you look at it more broadly, looking at all weapons they try to trace and including those they can’t trace anywhere, it’s still around half.

  Mexico has a huge problem that simultaneously stems from its own corruption and exacerbates, but Americans are on the sidelines throwing gasoline on the fire with high drug demand and being a source of at least some firearms in Mexico.

  Time to legalize marijuana, which will cut significantly into Mexican drug cartel profits.

• vince
  2:54 pm on June 26th, 2011 2

  If we could just pass another law….THAT would make bad people be good people.

• ChickenHead
  3:14 pm on June 26th, 2011 3

  100% of the guns ATF supplied Mexican criminals came from America.

  ATF = Alcohol, Tabacco, and Funk-ups

• setnaffa
  4:16 pm on June 26th, 2011 4

  in his #1, kushibo finally admits his muse…

• kushibo
  5:44 pm on June 26th, 2011 5

  Scusi?

• ChickenHead
  6:40 pm on June 26th, 2011 6

  “Time to legalize marijuana, which will cut significantly into Mexican drug cartel profits.”

  Absolutely. As with Prohibition, the only winners in the War on Drugs are the criminals and the bureaucrats.

  Cheap pot would keep a lot of shytbags off the streets for greater periods of time and would require less crime to finance their habit… and the underclass wouldn’t be so angry about being the underclass as long as they were properly “medicated”.

  It might also get some people off meth… which is a true nightmare.

  As for guns…

  As is always the case, when people who know little about guns start speaking of guns, they start looking more and more stupid… except to others that know even less about guns. Most reporters and politicians fit into this… and the amazing disinformation they say and write is unbelievable.

  Anyway…

  It doesn’t matter if Mexicans get guns from America or not. The trade is just like drugs. If you shut it down in one place, it starts up in another.

  The War on Guns would be another expensive failure… as there is great demand.

  The reality is that it is so incredibly cheap and easy to make a high-quality firearm with hand tools and scrap metal that buying them in the United States is only a matter of status and convenience.

  Hand-made copies of famous firearms are made in many third-world countries. While ownership of the real ones is seen as a status symbol, the copies are of very functional quality… and some are immediately indistinguishable from an original.

  Further, as many criminals, especially violent criminals, are instant gratification/short-term thinkers, abstract thoughts like maybe-going-to-jail don’t have as big of impact on immediate action as thoughts such as, “If I do this crime, that guy is going to shoot me.”

  Prison interview have shown the number one reason a crime wasn’t committed was due to a fear of the other party being armed. This is especially true for home invasion.

  So, using violence in Mexico as an excuse to change American gun ownership policy will have no effect on firearms availability in Mexico, will have no effect on firearms availability for American criminals (who will get more advanced weapons smuggled from Mexico), and will only give a further level of restrictions to American citizens who follow the law and are not criminals to begin with.

• Vince
  8:49 pm on June 26th, 2011 7

  But Chickenhead, can’t you understand? Freedom is DANGEROUS! No one should be allowed to be free. We need a bigger government with more rules to protect us and take care of us.

• Retired GI
  9:01 pm on June 26th, 2011 8

  @ 6 and 7 Total agreement.

• kushibo
  9:54 pm on June 26th, 2011 9

  I know there are a lot of people who think guns should be banned altogether, but some of us who think law-abiding citizens should be allowed, per the Constitution, to own handguns and hunting rifles and ammunition see some merit in, say, licensing requirements that include safety training (à la automobile usage) or not allowing unregistered gun sales out of the back of cars at gun shows.

  Like so many things, gun violence is impossible to eradicate completely but it is possible to curtail it. While there will always be someone willing to smuggle weapons across the border or make them in their garage, if the restrictions can effectively make them harder to get then they might prevent someone from getting one.

  Of course, we can start with the laws already on the books. Wasn’t Seunghui Cho able to get his firearms because of lax enforcement of laws? (asking, not saying).

• Vince
  12:38 am on June 27th, 2011 10

  Freedom is dangerous. So is f u cking with free people. Do so at your own risk.

  As for those killing each other in the zoos of our cities, let ‘em do it to each other. We just need to fence off those cesspits. Maybe even charge admission.

• Vince
  12:41 am on June 27th, 2011 11

  http://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2011/06/why-deafening-silence-in-mainstream.html

  Lovely. We’ve come so far.

• kushibo
  1:15 am on June 27th, 2011 12

  Vince, some are casting doubts on the report you just posted.

  I wonder if Mr Wilkinson suffers from that same disorder as the NY Post reporter who recently put up the video of one guy chopping down a tree and some others physically trying to stop him, who described it as the entire group of men trying to chop down the tree? Cognitive distortion, textbook example, that was.

• Glans
  4:01 am on June 27th, 2011 13

  Since the Constitution doesn’t enumerate a power to ban nuclear arms, the right to keep and bear arms includes nuclear arms.

• vince
  4:58 am on June 27th, 2011 14

  Indeed. The utes in question are probably just misunderstood. Let’s get ACORN on it.

• Retired GI
  5:49 am on June 27th, 2011 15

  @9 Kushibo – you ever been to a Gun Show? I think not. You sound like a Liberal trying to make nice. I’ve been to a few and never saw “guns being sold out of the trunks of cars”, or trucks for that matter. That’s a liberal line used by those with no experience in the subject.
  As for “training”, in some states it IS required.
  It isn’t called “safety training”. It is called Marksmanship.
  You don’t sound like someone who has ever touched a weapon.

  “Hunting rifles” ALL rifles are for hunting something. Let me guess: if it has a pistol grip, it isn’t a “hunting rifle right? You made no mention of shotguns. Does that mean you want them outlawed?
  There is no “should” be allowed Kushibo. We (Americans) are allowed as per the Second Amendment.

• Matthew
  7:41 am on June 27th, 2011 16

  STRATFOR’s report is a joke. Let’s look how they get down to the 10% of weapons are from the US… Well the first 75% they discount is the 75% of the weapons that weren’t in the sample done for testing. That’s an idiotic argument. The 25% that was tested, considered a representative sample of the the 75% that wasn’t tested showed that around 4,000 of the 7,200 guns tested came from the US. That’s over to 50% of the guns are coming from the US which is still an alarming number. Of the other 40% of guns that couldn’t be traced… well, that’s a huge number. Those numbers can’t be dismissed as US or non-US origin like STRATFOR does. The only way to get a guestimation of the number of those weapons is to look at data of weapons confiscated from crossing the border in the US to Mexico and looking at a percentage of those weapons that could be traced back to the US using the same methodology of the original study. If each confiscated shipment contained 90% that could be traced and 10% of weapons that couldn’t be traced, there would be an argument to increase the number of weapons originating from the US by 10% of the sample size. However, there is a problem of sample selection bias for both studies as well.

  What the STRATFOR report later does and should do is question the research methodologies and parameters of the original report. Are all weapons equal? Does finding 10 US origins .22 pistols the same thing as finding 10 Iranian RPGs. Of course not, and this is why talking in percentages doesn’t mean anything. This argument may be a better way to question the original study.

  And then again there is anecdotal evidence such as this:
  http://tucsoncitizen.com/view-from-baja-arizona/2011/03/01/another-federal-agent-killed-by-atf-walked-gun/

• ChickenHead
  12:11 pm on June 27th, 2011 17

  Kushibo,

  Once again, people who know little of guns (and gun laws) should not speak of guns (or gun laws).

  “see some merit in, say, licensing requirements that include safety training (à la automobile usage)”

  You may not have noticed but a driver’s license has ALMOST NOTHING TO DO WITH SAFETY and everything to do with government control of citizens.

  The roads are full of unsafe drivers who have the exact same credentials that safe drivers have.

  Traditionally, firearms safety was a skill passed down by relatives and enforced by peers who have no tolerance for careless action with dangerous devices.

  This is far more effective than a box-checking government program.

  I can only speak for myself here… but from the time I could walk, I remember the easy-reachable top drawer of the nightstand on my father’s side of the bed having 3 loaded pistols in it.

  They were shown to me to reduce curiosity but it was VERY clear that unauthorized touching would get an azz beating beyond imagination. It truly never even crossed my mind to touch them without permission… though I remember opening the drawer several times throughout childhood and quietly admiring their obvious precision and contemplating their latent power.

  When I asked about them, my father was always willing to unload them and hand them to me to inspect. By the time I was 7 or 8, he handed them to me loaded and I knew how to unload them, check them out, reload them, wipe them down, and hand them back.

  A very early memory is holding my father’s Colt 1911 .45 with my father standing behind me… his massive hands covering mine as I held the grips the best I could… as he instructed me to breathe and slowly squeeze the trigger. BOOM! It flew back over my head and the dirt in the berm in front of me erupted in a cloud of stones and dust.

  I don’t know the exact wording or conceptualizing I used… as I was 3 at the time… but my revised, adultified memory records it as exclaiming the toddler equivalent of “Funk yeah! Fire? Bang? Action at a distance? I’m sold, muuuutherfunker!”

  By the time I was 21, I owned the hardware and had the ability to do head shots at a half mile as fast as I could pull the trigger… but, more importantly, I learned to respect the power of the tools… and I understood the responsibility of their use… and I had a firm understanding of the consequences of their misuse.

  Between poor parents, an entertainment industry that trivializes/misrepresents the danger/power of firearms, and a nanny state which chooses to get involved in everything in the wrong way, it would seem to be a dying art for parents to just sit down and explain firearms (and alcohol, drugs, sex, prostitution, etc.) so kids would learn about it from someone who knows rather than from a misrepresenting media or from other kids who talk big but don’t really know either.

  Most of the people who are against guns in the hands of normal citizens just had poor or ignorant parents.

  Then again, for a nation of 300 million people with 350,000,000 guns in the majority of households, there really aren’t that many accidents or crimes with guns… and, in fact, more people die of poison/fumes than guns (both about 12,000/year discounting suicide)… but nobody gets all huffy about that (so to speak).

  “or not allowing unregistered gun sales out of the back of cars at gun shows.”

  First, the people committing most of the gun crime, inner-city minorities, are not frequent gun show shoppers.

  Second, nobody sells out of the “back of cars” at gun shows. ATF is always trolling around gun shows and are quick to jump on anyone selling guns out of the back of a car. While it is legal to sell a privately-owned firearm person-to-person, ATF refuses to say how many guns you must sell to be considered a dealer (which requires a license). This is consistent with ATF’s policy of never being clear about any of ATF’s policy.

  Third, gun registration is a term thrown about by people who know nothing about guns. Sales by dealers are recorded but are not “registered”. Some cities require registration… and some states, such as Hawaii, require registration… but “Registration is not mandatory for rifles and shotguns acquired in the state of Hawaii prior to July, 1994″… because people were all good back before the mid 90s.

  In most of the United States there is no “registration” and the federal government is forbidden from “registering” firearms (Federal Law 18 U.S.C. 926 (2) (a))… although the ATF (aka BATFE) does keep databases on serial numbers they run across (even in non-criminal situations).

  There is a huge resistance to any form of registration in America because, throughout history, registration is always followed by confiscation. This is true from Nazi Germany to Great Britain and Australia to New York City and Washington DC.

  Anybody who wants to yap about the evils of guns (instead of the evils of people and culture) is welcome to do so… especially if they are feeling constipated and need a new azzhole torn in them.

  The reality is that gun laws only affect people who are not criminals… as demonstrated in Mexico where only the smallest of guns are legal… and, as demonstrated in the Philippines where the rich have them and the criminals have them… with the average citizens caught between the inability to defend themselves and their village from organized criminals… and a mandatory 5 year prison term for possession of an unregistered gun… even if they have committed no crime.

  I hope this rant made sense. I’m off to bed instead of reading it back.

• ChickenHead
  12:33 pm on June 27th, 2011 18

  Glans,

  “Since the Constitution doesn’t enumerate a power to ban nuclear arms, the right to keep and bear arms includes nuclear arms.”

  I will take your question seriously… even though it is generally only voiced by ignorant gun control shills as a straw man argument.

  While I can write for pages about this, the short version is that the Founding Fathers wrote that American citizens have the right to possess arms for the purpose of self-defense.

  A firearm is a discriminate weapon of self-defense.

  A nuclear weapon is indiscriminate and is unsuitable for self-defense. As with other destructive devices, such as hand grenades, bombs, RPGs, mortars, etc., that are not suitable for self-defense, they have been found not to fall under the protection of the 2nd Amendment.

  …although you can submit an application to BATFE to own these things if you wish… and, if you have a reasonable reason, they may approve it.

  Only extremest, ideologs, wackos, and strawman-creating liberals try to argue for the possession of destructive devices.

  Average firearm owners don’t speak of this nonsense.

  They are just normal people who WANT TO BE LEFT ALONE… especially by busy-body fake do-gooders who spend all their time devising unnecessary controls for average citizens while coddling career criminals.

  Any more questions, Glans?

• kushibo
  2:46 pm on June 27th, 2011 19

  Retired GI wrote:
  

  @9 Kushibo – you ever been to a Gun Show? I think not.

  I have, in California and Nevada (and possibly Minnesota when I was very young), but not since I was a teenager.

  Although I didn’t handle them a lot, I grew up with firearms in my house. My father owned at least one handgun, used for self-defense when he went on solo trips in his Toyota camper out into the wilderness, and a slew of hunting rifles. As he did with all of his kids, he took me out of school for a week in October of my 7th grade year for a nine-day to stay with relatives in Minnesota and go hunting trip in the forests. It was meant as a “bonding” experience and as a chance to impart in his kids an appreciation for hunting small animals, something he did a lot when he was a kid. Of course, we had to eat whatever we killed, which is exactly what I did with the one squirrel I got with my .22 (my dad said there weren’t as many squirrels out on that trip, but I was slightly nearsighted — though my parents hadn’t yet realized it — and I might have missed a couple because of that). My sister managed to kill half a dozen, I think. Prior to that, I was part of a church-run Boy Scouts-like wilderness organization that included marksmanship for our weeklong camping outing one year. I did fire a handgun then, but it was mostly rifles. After that, my handling of rifles was mostly shooting cans out in the Nevada desert when we were visiting relatives. I took my little brother and our family friend out one time for that, which pissed off my parents because the tumbleweeds scratched up the paint on the Honda. I’m not sure where the handgun is, but the rifles are stored underneath the bed I sleep in when I’m in Orange County staying at my parents’ home. My father made sure we had an appreciation for gun safety but weren’t skittish around guns. The only time I ever thought about owning a gun personally, though, was when I had received physical threats while a student at UCI and I lived alone in the campus trailer park.
  

  You sound like a Liberal trying to make nice. I’ve been to a few and never saw “guns being sold out of the trunks of cars”, or trucks for that matter. That’s a liberal line used by those with no experience in the subject.

  Your overuse of “liberal” (and “PC” for that matter), is so hackneyed as to be meaningless at this point. In your case it simply means anyone you disagree with (or vice versa), and it actually distracts from any argument you’re trying to make. See if you can make a substantive argument without using those words or similar pejoratives. When you quickly jump to those, Retired GI, it’s like you do an end run on your own thinking processes, and you make assumptions and draw conclusions that aren’t valid, like saying I “don’t sound like someone who has ever touched a weapon.”

  Anyway, I’m not a liberal, certainly not on guns, at least. And what may seem to you like concessions to gun ownership certainly have nothing to do with “trying to make nice.” Whether you think so or not, I do value the right to bear arms, even if my idea of well-regulated might involve a little more regulation than yours.

  As for the gun shows, my comment above was a conflation (and a somewhat sloppy one) of news exposés from eh 1990s about people at gun shows selling weapons out of their car (which could be evil liberal media making it all up) and, more currently, the supposed “gun show loophole” that purportedly allows some to bypass background checks. I should have simply focused on the background checks, which alone is problematic.
  

  As for “training”, in some states it IS required.
  

  You don’t sound like someone who has ever touched a weapon.

  No doubt, I don’t have the wealth of experience that many here do, but I have fired at least a few. Touched them as well.
  

  You made no mention of shotguns. Does that mean you want them outlawed?

  Not sure what you’re getting at here. I didn’t make a statement, so you’re filling one in for me? I’m not even sure what your point is. Where are you getting that I want shotguns outlawed?
  

  There is no “should” be allowed Kushibo. We (Americans) are allowed as per the Second Amendment.

  I think you’re trying to get me in a gotcha moment, but you’re assuming meaning that is not mine. Please take note that I was the one who cited the Constitution, so obviously I think

• kushibo
  2:50 pm on June 27th, 2011 20

  Whiskey tango frak! I didn’t touch anything but that went through. I’m having the worst luck here with posting today.

  The blockquotes are all sperwered toward the end, but you can figure out who was saying what.

  The last thing I was trying to say was that I obviously see gun ownership as a right accorded by the Constitution, but my use of the word “should” is an acknowledgement that there is a gap in practice and interpretation between what really goes on and what should go on. If you took the word “should” as evidence of a lack of support for gun ownership, you’re mistaken.

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