Courtesy of the Establishment minions at the Washington Post and the good truppen at BATFE comes this tale of woe re our poor hermanos to the South, who seem to be having some problems with weapons and the American border:
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Corrupt customs officials help smuggle weapons into Mexico, earning as much as $1 million for large shipments, police here say. The weapons are often bought legally at gun shows in Arizona and other border states where loopholes allow criminals to stock up without background checks.
The arms traffickers have left Mexico awash in AK-47s, pistols, telescope sighting devices, grenades, grenade launchers and high-powered ammunition, such as the so-called cop-killer bullets believed to be able to penetrate bulletproof vests.
"You're looking at the same firepower here on the border that our soldiers are facing in Iraq and Afghanistan," Thomas Mangan, a spokesman in Phoenix for the ATF, said in an interview.
Weapons have been smuggled into Mexico for decades. For instance, the .38 Special used in 1994 to assassinate presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio here in Tijuana was traced to a gun sale in Arizona. Mexico is a rich market for smugglers because it bans high-caliber automatic weapons -- even police are prohibited from using them -- and has strict gun laws that make it extremely difficult for members of the public to buy handguns.
But law enforcement officers on both sides of the border have never seen anything like the flood of guns now surging into Mexico. The increase has been stoked by the cartel war and by the ease of buying high-powered weapons since the U.S. assault weapons ban was not renewed in 2004, William Newell, a special agent in charge of the ATF's Phoenix office, said in an interview...
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I guess a border wall wouldn't work just as well against southbound traffic as it would against northbound coyotes and their prey, now would it?
Expect to see more stories like this one as part of the groundwork for AWB 2 (this time, with no grandfathering and no sunset date) in 2009, to be followed within five years by a "harmonization" of American, Mexican, and Canadian gun laws carried out by unaccountable bureaucrats under the auspices of the Security and Prosperity Partnership, also known as the North American Union.
Doubters should read this white paper and note such statements as "[t]he design of the SPP is innovative, eschewing the more traditional diplomatic and trade negotiation models in favor of talks among civil service professionals and subject matter experts within each government." There's also a lovely discussion on page 17 on how the SPP end product will avoid the need for ratification by Congress.
Anything to avoid those messy political situations, you know. They can be so hard to manage.
By the way - any bets on whether the Second's "shall not be infringed" language will be the basis for the gun law harmonization between the three SPP "partners"?
Tempus fugit...
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