You can hear the whip cracking now if you listen closely. It seems that Mexican President Felipe Calderon is in the process of writing the White House gun control policy. Given how quickly Obama was to fold on the Inter-American Arms Treaty, we should probably prepare to fight not only that, but the rest of Mexico’s demands following their meeting:
- Ban on semi-automatic rifles
- Gun owner registry
- One gun-a-month
- Enact Mexican gun laws in the United States
That bit about applying Mexican gun laws here in the United States is exactly what Paul Helmke called for last month. That list is just from one press conference. I’m sure if we looked back at his other statements, he’d find even more demands. Just like our own President, the Mexican President pays lip service to “respecting” the Second Amendment, but argues that if American citizens could just understand how much of a problem the drug trade is for Mexico, then we should be willing to compromise it away as if that’s simply the neighborly thing to do.
President Obama might dance for you as you crack your whip, President Calderon. But we voters will oppose every gun restriction you tell him to introduce. We will send his party packing from Congress, and you will get nothing. It would be better to get your own house in order instead of telling us what to do and trying to rewrite our Constitution for us.
“then we should be willing to compromise it away as if that’s simply the neighborly thing to do”
Or, you know, we could build a fence?
Well, all they want are reasonable restrictions. You know, like the ones Washington D.C. had until recently. No ban of firearms, just regulations that make having a firearm 99.999+% impossible. Unless, of course, you are a criminal anyway or have access to “authorized” armed bodyguards.
I have 3 questions for President Obama…
“How many drug cartels exist in the US?”
“How many drug cartels exist in Mexico?”
“I see… Now explain to me again why we want to use Mexico as a template?”
To play Devil’s Advocate, Rob, that argument is going to get shot full of holes quickly – while there aren’t any heavily armed gangs in the US on par with the cartels, there are extensions of the drug cartels in of themselves in the US…
A lot of smoke gets blown around the real issue here, from both sides of the border and both ends of American politics. Guns aren’t the problem, the black market for drugs is the problem. I’m no advocate or defender of recreational drug use (I hereby wholeheartedly defend and promote recreational gun use!), but we need to wise up en mass to the futility of a failed prohibitionist drug policy, with its dismal cost-to-benefit success rate and philosophical underpinnings in keeping with Tiananmen Square and female circumcision. Illicit drugs are bad, but totalitarian control over personal freedom is worse.
Meanwhile, the greatest beneficiaries of the War on Drugs remain the traffickers and the police, both of whom rely on the black market for job security. And the final insult? American farmers are essentially forbidden to grow non-psychoactive industrial hemp, the same crop that produced the paper the Constitution was written on, because hemp superficially resembles a controlled plant. Thomas Jefferson would likely throw up.