Government Seeks to Grab Guns to Aid Mexico
April 20, 2009 by Bob Livingston
A lucrative criminal enterprise is growing in Mexico and being exported across the border in the United States.
No, it’s not the sale of drugs, although that activity continues unabated despite the running battles between drug cartels and the Mexican government. Battles that are growing so intense that Mexican officials—like mayors and police chiefs—are beginning to live across the border in Texas to stay safe.
The new enterprise is kidnapping, and the incidents are growing in frequency and becoming more and more violent by the day.
According to the Stratfor Global Security and Intelligence Report, Mexican gangs have begun targeting people in different socio-economic levels: from the very wealthy to the common man or woman, and even foreign tourists. And just as the targets vary, the reasons for the kidnapping vary as well.
Some are kidnapped by drug gangs to intimidate, to extract information or just to “have fun” at the expense of a rival drug gang through torture and murder. Still others hold the victims for weeks in order to extract large ransoms. And sometimes the thugs just grab and hold a victim off the streets—whether a Mexican citizen or a foreign tourist—long enough to use his ATM card to clean out the bank account.
It’s gotten so bad that Stratfor calls Mexico the kidnapping capitol of the world, and gangs are beginning to use something called a virtual kidnapping: calling people and telling them they have kidnapped a family member and collecting a ransom without actually having kidnapped anybody.
And it’s begun to spill across the border with reports of kidnappings for ransom or murder—usually illegal immigrants so far—occurring in Texas and Arizona.
So how does the administration of President Barack Obama respond? Attorney General Eric Holder called for a ban on so-called assault weapons. Holder said in a February news conference that such a ban would help cut down the flow of guns going across the border.
But the types of weapons that would be banned are not the type commonly being used by gangs and drug cartels. In their battles with police the criminals are employing fragmentation grenades, fully automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. After a recent battle in which five cartel gunmen were killed and several more wounded, police even recovered a 60-mm mortar—all weapons that are unavailable to average citizens in the U.S. under existing laws.
Yet Holder believes that disarming Americans, as violent drug cartels battle along the border and kidnapping gangs sneak into America, is the right course of action.
And Holder and Obama aren’t the only ones trying to disarm U.S. citizens. Currently in Congress is H.R. 45 which will “prohibit a person from possessing a firearm unless that person has been issued a firearm license under this Act or a state system certified under this Act and such license has not been invalidated or revoked.”
In Albany, NY, lawmakers are considering legislation that would tightly regulate the sale of all ammunition. The new law would require anyone “buying rounds or shells, even .22s, would have to show identification, declare the gun and have its serial number registered with the ammo seller. The buyer would have to state his intent of use, and could be refused the purchase. The ammo seller, at the same time, would be required to keep records for 10 years.”
Never mind the Second Amendment, which guarantees that the right to keep and bear arms will not be infringed. Never mind the 10th Amendment, which restricts the U.S. Government from taking over powers not specifically enumerated by the Constitution.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that those in Government who have taken an oath to defend the Constitution are more interested in shredding it to remove any obstacles to their seizing more and more power.
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