Guns, Pot And National Security-- In The U.S. And Mexico

Time to legalize pot and outlaw heavy weapons

I don't know anyone else who ever went to Afghanistan to kick drugs. But after a few months there in the late 60s I was ready. One day I woke up in Jalalabad, in the back of the VW van that was my home for 3 years, and said shúker and Da khoday-pe-aman to a country I had grown to love and to a drug lifestyle that had defined the last 5 years of my life... and headed for the Khyber Pass. I was off to India. But first stop after the historic Pass was Peshawar, charming city, kind of a wild west town with far more horses and buggies-- horses with red plumes on their heads-- than cars. I had always thought it remarkable that every single man in Afghanistan-- and remember, this was in 1969, before the Taliban and before the Russian invasion, before the disintegration of Afghan society-- carried a gun, usually a big one. In Peshawar I saw where they came from. It was the biggest gun market I had ever seen in my life-- the whole town. Guns everywhere, and every type imaginable. Other weapons too. Watch this clip on the biggest illegal gun market in the world.

This morning I woke up and I heard a DEA agent talking about how the U.S. Mexican border is a problem because of drugs and guns being smuggled into the U.S. She missed a much bigger problem-- guns being smuggled into Mexico, enough guns to destabilize the entire country. This morning's NY Times actually got it right: U.S. Is Arms Bazaar for Mexican Cartels. You probably heard about the big crackdown the U.S. and Mexico are coordinating this week against the murderous Sinaloa Drug Cartel. Last year alone over 6,000 Mexicans have been gunned down by this outfit. And the guns almost all come from one place: the U.S.A. "Drug gangs seek out guns in the United States because the gun-control laws are far tougher in Mexico. Mexican civilians must get approval from the military to buy guns and they cannot own large-caliber rifles or high-powered pistols, which are considered military weapons... Mexican authorities have long complained that American gun dealers are arming the cartels."

[T]he sheer volume of licensed dealers-- more than 6,600 along the border alone, many of them operating out of their houses-- makes policing them a tall order. Currently the A.T.F. has about 200 agents assigned to the task.

Smugglers routinely enlist Americans with clean criminal records to buy two or three rifles at a time, often from different shops, then transport them across the border in cars and trucks, often secreting them in door panels or under the hood, law enforcement officials here say. Some of the smuggled weapons are also bought from private individuals at gun shows, and the law requires no notification of the authorities in those cases.

...The Mexican government began to clamp down on drug cartels in late 2006, unleashing a war that daily deposits dozens of bodies-- often gruesomely tortured-- on Mexico’s streets. President Felipe Calderón has characterized the stream of smuggled weapons as one of the most significant threats to security in his country. The Mexican authorities say they seized 20,000 weapons from drug gangs in 2008, the majority bought in the United States.

The authorities in the United States say they do not know how many firearms are transported across the border each year, in part because the federal government does not track gun sales and traces only weapons used in crimes. But A.T.F. officials estimate 90 percent of the weapons recovered in Mexico come from dealers north of the border.

In Peshawar the gun merchants care as little about Afghans killing each other as Americans gun merchants care about Mexicans killing each other. And in this country, where gun worship is practically recognized as a religion, the government-- at least for the last 8 years-- has done virtually nothing about it, despite the volcanic situation brewing just south of our border. (Just yesterday an irresponsible gaggle of cowardly, right-wing senators tried forcing the District of Columbia to abolish its gun control laws to satisfy campaign contributors in the gun industry and the lunatic fringe of their ideological base.) Yesterday Attorney General Holder called the Mexican drug cartels "a national security threat." He's right-- and President Obama seems determined to ban the kinds of assault weapons that have been causing mayhem on both sides of the border. The context was a coordinated assault on the cartel's operations on both sides of the border. As many as 1,000 people have been arrested so far-- the raids are ongoing-- in California, Maryland and Minnesota. Watch this report from MSNBC about the nexus between the Mexican drug cartel, national security and archaic American gun worship:

That said, more Americans realize that it isn't drug use that is the threat as it is the criminal gangs capitalizing on anti-drug regulations. Recent polling shows that over 40% of Americans now favor marijuana legalisation. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Ron Paul (R-TX) proposed legalizing marijuana last year. Jim McDermott (D-WA), Pete Stark (D-CA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), William Clay (D-MO) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), were the only members of Congress mature enough to sign on as co-sponsors. The bill died. This year On Obama's Change.gov Web site asked the public to submit policy ideas for his transition team to look at. The most popular idea, by a landslide was legalizing marijuana use. California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano has introduced a bill in the Golden State to legalize and tax pot. There are a lot of reasons to do it-- striking a blow against the Mexican drug cartels being one-- but the $1.3 billion in annual tax receipts for the hard-pressed California state government is definitely one.