The Iron Trickle: changing U.S. gun laws won't disarm Mexican drug cartels

April 16, 3:24 AMSt. Louis Gun Rights ExaminerKurt Hofmann

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        AP photo/Denis Poroy

The beat goes on. 

Incessantly, relentlessly, the American public is bombarded with the assertion that much of the blame for Mexican drug trafficking violence can be squarely placed on "lax U.S. gun laws."

With President Obama going to Mexico, and with the appointment of a "border czar" (what's with the trend of referring to government officials with a term related to Russian monarchy, anyway?), the issue of the Second Amendment's supposed culpability for the Mexican violence is front and center in the news again.

The opportunistic forcible citizen disarmament lobby has not been slow to notice the favorable media environment, with both the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center dumping press releases and "studies" on whomever they can get to read them.

Never mind that the "90%" myth has been soundly debunked (forcing even the VPC's Tom Diaz and Attorney General Eric Holder to hastily back away from the lie).  Never mind that much of the carnage is wrought with weapons that no one is getting on the legal civilian gun market in the U.S. (although some are no doubt supplied as part of U.S. foreign policy to Latin America).  Never mind that 150 thousand Mexican soldiers have deserted the Army over the last 6 years, many to work for the cartels, bringing their military training--and sometimes their weapons--to their new jobs (or that even the U.S. military has been infiltrated by gangs affiliated with the drug cartels, sometimes another source of military weapons).

None of that matters--a novel new justification has been found for the banning of so-called "assault weapons," and if the truth isn't compatible with that justification, the truth is simply going to have to be shouted down.

Well, here's some more truth for them to shout down.

Even if the supply of U.S. guns was cut off, as long as the flow of money to the cartels continues, they could re-arm themselves by buying from other countries, including eastern Europe or Central America, where surplus weapons dating to conflicts in the 1980s remain, analysts said.

"It's convenient for the cartels to be able to shop in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and elsewhere," said George Grayson, a Mexico scholar at the College of William & Mary and author of the monograph "Mexico's Struggles with Guns and Thugs." But stopping the U.S. trade merely would place "a thorn in the side of the cartels, rather than an AK-47 in the heart."

The drug kingpins are billionaires, and international smuggling is what they do.  As black marketeers, they thrive on prohibition, be it prohibition of drugs, or of weapons, their livelihood is based on moving products that can't be moved openly or legally.

Such people will not be thwarted by more prohibition.

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