I have been getting persistent first-hand reports of pretty much every gun store within 100 miles of the Mexican border being emptied. For example:
I stopped by Turners Gun Shop in San Marcos today. They were basically all out of almost everything, both guns and ammo.I have heard that every gun store within 100 miles of the Mexican border has basically been emptied by straw buyers buying guns for the Mexican drug cartels as part of their ongoing drug war.
I remember when I was a kid, when gangs were armed with pocket knives and the occasional zip gun because that's all anybody had money to buy. Then the gangs started dealing heroin and meth, and later crack, and had all the money they could ever want to buy all the weapons in the world. So much for the "war on drugs", bah.
-- Badtux the Well-armed Penguin
War "ON" Drugs or War "OF" drugs? Brought to you, of course, by your fellow Americans who think it's SOOOOO cool to snort the line, or hit the pipe, or spike the vein. We have met the enemy; he is us, but so far he's mostly torturing and beheading the brown people on the other side of the imaginary boundary line.
ReplyDeleteOf course, Mrs. Bukko and I always bought American. Viva Humboldt County!
If the gun dealers on this side of the border, like that Iknadosian from Arizona, would stop selling guns to people in large quantities maybe that would help.
ReplyDeleteI know Arizona has very weak gun laws and if the state did something about that it would help, too.
I'm not advocating gun bans, but who needs an AK47 or a .50 caliber sniper rifle for hunting?
I think we can blame Bush and the Rethuglicans for allot of this by allowing the ban on assault weapons to expire. If that ban was still in effect the drug gangs wouldn't be able to get all those high-powered weapons so easily.
Well, 50 caliber sniper rifles are quite useful if you're hunting really big game (grizzly bear or moose or whatever). Grizzling bears are *damned* hard to kill... their heart is hidden behind a thousand pounds of blubber, and their brain is protected by a sloped skull of the general density of brick that bullets tend to just skip off of. As for AK47's, they are terrible cheap weapons, woefully inaccurate, that can be purchased for $5 apiece in most third world nations which is the only reason they're still used today. But they are nice pieces of military history, even if they're not accurate beyond 100 yards due to their cheap stamped-metal construction. (Which design, however, is ridiculously robust... the stories of AK-47's firing just fine after being buried in a swamp are not fairy tales, it was an ideal weapon for the VC and NVA in the jungles of Vietnam because of its ability to deal with the dirt and humidity and 100 yards effective range doesn't matter in a jungle).
ReplyDeleteFrankly, I don't think guns are the problem here. *MONEY* is the problem here. There is so much money involved in the "War on Drugs" that it's enabling these criminal gangs to buy enormous amounts of lethal weaponry, regardless of the source of supply (and the U.S. is handy only because it's just across the border from them, not because they couldn't get the guns from elsewhere if the U.S. suddenly banned sales of guns). And the police departments north of the border are similarly buying enormous amounts of lethal weaponry thanks to all the money they're getting for the War on Drugs, whether it's confiscating some granny's life savings and requiring her to prove it's not "drug money", or getting huge federal grants to buy a long list of lethal weaponry that cops back when I was a kid could have only dreamed of having access to (they were pretty much stuck with .38 revolvers and 12 gauge pump shotguns back then, this was before SWAT teams were invented, even). Both criminals and cops are profiting enormously from the War on Drugs. The rest of us... uhm, no.
- Badtux the War Penguin
Umm Dude?
ReplyDeleteSan Marcos practically IS Mexico. In certain parts of town the store clerks speak really bad English.
I quit one job because nobody could talk to me in English.