Armas de Mexico

I've mentioned before that there's was a growing number of people who would have thought shooting the illegal Mexicans would be OK.

Mexicans are shooting each other now over drug smuggling.

The anti-gun people are attempting to make us feel bad about that. It's not going to work, because we're OK with people shooting Mexicans thanks to people like them.

I've seen "90% of the guns used by Mexican drug cartels come from the USA," bandied about, implying that it's people like me supplying all those guns. Then they talk about the machine guns and grenades the cartels have. Many times they show pictures. I'm a gun geek and I know an M16A2 when I see it. There were less than 1,000 of those to hit the civilian market before the 1986 ban on new civil manufacture hit. What this likely means is this gun comes not from a gun-owner in the US, but a government agency of some kind.

Since M16A2 are made by Colt in Hartford Connecticut, and FN in McLean, Virginia, I guess you can say they came from America even if it didn't come from a civilian gun owner. I'm willing to bet that if we call Colt and asked them to tell us who they sold that S/N rifle to they'll point us to a government arms room somewhere. I am also willing to bet that the majority of the guns being used in Mexico were exported to a nation to support their drug interdiction program.

I am entirely fed up with being blamed for a problem I am not the cause of. I don't do drugs, so I am not part of the market that the cartels are fighting about. I did not make the drugs illegal, which makes them expensive enough to be worth fighting about. I did not make the border so porous that anyone can wander in unchallenged; if you can't stop someone from walking in without a penny to their name, you are damn sure not going to stop someone with the level of funding the drug cartels have.

But, just for the sake of argument, let's say that the everyday average gun owner is the principal source of guns for the Mexican druggies. I have a solution to the problem, that also addresses the illegal immigrant problem. Seal the damn border. Make it so that nobody just can walk in and you also make it so they can't just walk out. Use the Army. It's what armies are for, defending the frontier. If the Mexican government gets butt-hurt about it, invite them to try and stop us. Now we get to use the Marines and they get to overemphasize the "halls of Montezuma" part of the song.

Of course, the real solution is not militarizing the border. It's eliminating the reasons people are smuggling the shit in. Mexicans come here because Mexico is a shit-hole by comparison to the shit-hole jobs they're coming to do here. That would require changing things about how we force businesses to operate and changing the underlying issues of Mexico. Minimum wage, OSHA, and all manner of taxes make hiring illegals cheaper than hiring Americans. And this is all about the bottom line, if company A is using illegals and company B isn't they can sell for less, and they do. If the consumer, that's us, doesn't boycott company A, then company B is losing business because they can't lower the price of their goods because of labor. Just like drugs, it's us that are the source of the problem.

Drugs are expensive enough to kill over. The only way to make that not true is either legalize them or stop enforcing the law to the extent that it's defacto legal. I don't think there's a way to get the demand to go away.