generalspeaking

Conscience? Scruples? That's for Losers

"At the beginning I felt bad, but you get used to it."
"It's the way you can have a good time. You sell weapons, you earn money and you have fun."
23-year-old Mexican prison inmate

Weapons seized along US border with Mexico  InSight Crime

"Reporting on crime in Mexico for over a decade, I have witnessed the devastation these weapons cause more times than I can count."
"At a stoplight in the city of Culiacan, I saw the corpses of five police officers whom assailants ambushed and sprayed with more than 400 bullets."
"I've been at crime scenes where the assassins killed their targets while firing hundreds of rounds that mowed down innocent bystanders, including children."
Ioan Grillo, Ciudad Juarez, Mexico

The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

The United States has a problem with guns. Readily available without too much of a hassle, American citizens can buy all manner of guns, rifles and machine guns of various types. It is one of the most armed nations in the world. And gun violence, understandably is high, despite that gun owners clinging to their entitled right under the Second Amendment of the American Constitution insist that gun ownership is sacrosanct and no one can repeal the law that makes it so.

The powerful lobby of the influential National Rifle Association claims it is gun ownership by legal, lawful gun owners that helps to prevent gun violence, that armed citizens are able to intervene in crisis situations, to lower the elevated violence and take steps with the authority of the arms they possess, to divest an ill-doer of his/her intent to maim and to kill. The situation reads like legally armed citizens versus gun-toting psychopaths.

Alas, guns cannot be kept within American borders; they gravitate outward to infest their northern neighbour as well as the neighbour to the south. Canada has a problem with the illegal entry of American-sourced firearms in the possession of criminals. But Canada's problem is as nothing in comparison to that of Mexico where drugs and violence are paired with guns and unrestrained murder and mayhem.

A cache of seized weapons displayed at a news conference in Phoenix. (Matt York / Associated Press)

The young inmate sentenced to prison in Mexico when a cousin turned him in to authorities, motivated by an argument the two young men had, knew enough to stay far away from U.S. gun shops to acquire the weapons he sold at great profit in Mexico, smuggling AR-15 semiautomatic rifles he would pay $500 for, across the border in his truck, the guns hidden in kitchen appliances. Once in Mexico, he could count on selling the illegal weapons for up to five times what he paid.

He experienced no difficulties whatever in buying whatever he wanted at weekend gun shows in Texas. At those shows purchase of firearms from private sellers is done without a background check, let alone proof of citizenship. Each of those trips and their transactions resulted in  his bringing about a dozen guns back with him to Mexico, to be unloaded at his inflated selling price to those anxious to possess a semiautomatic rifle.

The wealth he amassed assuaged his initial feelings of guilt for his involvement in providing criminal elements, drug traffickers and cartel members with the deadly weapons they use to kill their competitors, any authorities that get in their way, and just incidentally, innocent bystanders. Now in prison for nine years, he can dream about the house he bought, the cars and the motorcycles, with his profits. Presumably they'll still be there when he emerges from prison, a decade older.

Mexico is swimming in guns, brought in across the border from the United States. The United States, on the other hand, is stuffed with illegal drugs that are smuggled across the border from Mexico. Without the guns the drug cartels would be less deadly. Without the drugs addicted American citizens would be less numerous, their overdose deaths less frequent. This is a relationship honed in hell, one of seemingly mutual dependence and hideously mutual carnage.

A new government report details the problems agencies face in fighting weapons trafficking. Here, thousands of guns lie on the ground before being destroyed in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in 2012.    AFP/AFP/Getty Images

The Mexican Justice Department traced -- over a six-year period -- over 74,500 firearms taken from criminals in Mexico to the United States. The firearms manufactured in the U.S. or imported from other manufacturing countries. Cartel gunmen use those weapons to commit daily murders. A study by the University of San Diego and the Igarape Institute undertaken in 2013 estimated that 253,000 firearms were purchased for trafficking over the southern border between 2010 and 2012.

One single legal firearms shop exists in the whole of Mexico, operating out of a military base in Mexico City. Buyers must first apply for permits given only when six forms of identification are shown, including proof of no criminal record, a letter from an employer, and the patience to wait for the process to play out; months, at the very least.

Contrast that with anyone at all simply walking into a gun show where a semiautomatic rifle is sold without question. The guns are used in mass murders across Mexico perpetrated by criminal death squads. "The biggest reason why some Mexicans are afraid to return to Mexico is because of criminal organizations, mostly drug traffickers", according to the website Political Asylum, U.S.A.

The prospect of falling victim to the .50 calibre sniper rifles which also target Mexican police and military members or when hitmen with Kalashnikovs produced in China and the Czech Republic, sold in the U.S. where cartels operate workshops to convert semiautomatic AR-15s into fully automatic weapons, is the stuff of nightmares to ordinary Mexicans.

A vehicle makes its way along an alley in a Tijuana, Mexico, neighborhood where residents literally live across the fence from the United States, living beside a numbered fence. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images

Labels: Drug Cartels, Firearms, Mexico, Smuggling, United States, Violence

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, May 22, 2018