Johnny Get and then Sell Your Guns

Johnny Get and then Sell Your Guns

We know there are laws against official US government tallies of American civilian murders by gun, that the statistics we can get are assembled from aggregating other sources… a provision fomented by the gun lobby in the US… but the death toll is this country is obvious. We know, for example, that firearms are the leading cause of death in the United States for children and teens. Some of seem to be aware that a lot of those at our southern border are escaping the ultra-violence of gang/cartel efforts in their home countries… with cops and politicians “back home” seriously on the take as drugs flow northward like rivers. Money from US drug customers is extremely lucrative. You can buy entire nations and political systems with that cash.

There are only two legal gun stores in Mexico (government owned), and while there is a right for Mexicans to own guns, there is a parallel prequalifying process of vetting, training and psychological testing that can take years. But if you want it, all over Mexico and points south, you can find someone to sell it to you. Guns. 50 caliber machine guns. Anti-aircraft guns. AR-15s and their ilk. Large capacity magazines. Silencers. Bump stocks. Semi-automatic pistols. And the usual small stuff. Hunting rifles. Revolvers. You know. Good quality weapons. Virtually all made in the United States and not sold through those government gun stores. And it’s an ugly secret that American gunmakers count on the illicit trade of US sourced weapons smuggled south. Some US made firearms even have south-of-the border heroes’ images on them.

Trump, Trump, Trump… knows all and blames all. He sabotaged meaningful bipartisan legislation in Congress to keep that toxic immigration issue alive to lambast Biden. In a world of rightwing American blame, sacred American guns are never the problem. Neither is the plague of American drug consumer demand that paid for those smuggled firearms. Even as this combination is producing the well-armed cartels with the vast sums of bribery and “put the cops on our payroll” money. It’s those rapists, murders and wanton criminals in our country “illegally” who are completely representative of those asylum seekers at the border. That lawsuit, filed by the government of Mexico against US arms makers who are the source of those cartel weapons, must be a sham. Cartels are even more violent in Central America (especially Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador), scaring illiterate people out of those nations on a desperate path north.

Why does it take hackers to generate the scintilla of hard evidence that American drug money and readily available guns sold in the US ARE THE PROBLEM?! Reporting for the May 22nd USA Today, Nick Penzenstadler summarizes what the resulting leaks from Mexican intelligence reveal: “A massive leak of Mexican military intelligence has exposed for the first time in two decades U.S. gun shops and smugglers tied to 78,000 firearms recovered south of the border – and which types of guns are being trafficked…

“As part of the leak, emails relaying U.S. government data between Mexican military leaders and PowerPoint presentations by Mexico’s attorney general show which American straw buyers were tied to the most weapons as of 2022.

“Among them is Texan Craig Adlong. He pleaded guilty in 2020 for lying on firearm transaction forms, saying the guns were for his personal use. He purchased 95 semi-automatic rifles at Guns Unlimited in Katy, Texas, making seven visits over two months… Sixty-six of those firearms were recovered in Mexico, according to the leak… Reached by phone, Adlong told USA TODAY he was surprised he remained on Mexican officials' radar after serving a six-month prison sentence. He made a mistake, he said, that he has put behind him… Asked if he worries about acts of violence being committed with guns tied to his name, he said, ‘Absolutely. You’d have to be an animal not to.’

“Of the other six top purchasers, half are linked to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives scandal known as Fast and Furious… From 2006-2011 agents in Arizona stood down as straw purchasers illegally bought 2,000 guns at shops, intending to use the information to track trafficking patterns and arrest the kingpins. However, agents didn’t deliver the high-level arrests – and in the process, they lost track of hundreds of guns.” Those 78,000 smuggled firearms are a drop in the bucket looking at all the gun trafficking over the past two decades.

But protecting unrestricted gun sales in the United States is a MAGA imperative. Gun control is thwarted at every turn by our gun-crazy judicial system. The latest: “A federal judge has blocked a new Biden administration rule that requires gun dealers to run background checks on buyers at gun shows and other places outside of gun shops… The rule, which was due to come into effect on Monday [5/20], aimed to close the so-called ‘gun show loophole’ that has allowed unlicensed dealers to sell tens of thousands of guns a year without conducting background checks on buyers… U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo temporarily blocked the rule from being enforced in Texas or against members of several gun rights groups, including the Gun Owners of America, which has about 2 million members.” Ali Shoaib reporting for the May 20th Newsweek.

In case that name sounds familiar, that’s the same Trump-appointed judge who, back in April, suspended the FDA’s two+ decade approval of abortion pill mifepristone, a case which has wended its way up to the US Supreme Court. It is also in a small judicial district where there is only one federal judge who hears any case brought in that district, a magnificent and uniformly evangelically conservative forum shopping venue where God, guns and Trump are sacrosanct.

I’m Peter Dekom, and US consumer demand for illicit drug plus American sourced guns are not “a” problem in a nation that loves to blame innocent asylum seekers, they are “the” problem!