Caravan for Peace calls for effort to stop gun smuggling to Mexico

[SecularMotion]

EL PASO, Texas — The Caravan for Peace is in Texas as part of a cross-country bus tour to raise awareness about the United State’s role in Mexico’s drug war.

The road trip started in San Diego a week ago Sunday and includes 26 U.S. cities.

The Peace Caravan rolled up to El Paso City Hall Tuesday morning and packed a city council meeting.

“Eighty-thousand men, women and children have been killed in Mexico, almost 11,000 of them in our sister city, Ciudad Juarez, during the past five years,” said City Council Representative Susie Bryd, with her voice cracking as she read a resolution in support of the Peace Caravan’s initiatives.

http://www.kvue.com/news/166982966.html

[Reasonable_Argument]

1. The quickest way to deal with this problem

Would be to put the military on the border and legalize cannabis.

[holdencaufield]

2. Put the military on the border ...

... WITH Cannabis.

We could film "Stripes II"

[rDigital]

25. I like where this is going. nt

[ileus]

3. Wanna really help? Stop buying their drugs.

[Hangingon]

6. +1

Well said!

[4th law of robotics]

4. Murder rates in the US spiked when we had prohibition

and immediately dropped once we got rid of it.

Guns didn't magically become more available or more lethal (actually National firearms act was passed during this time in response to the increase in violence).

So clearly the solution to high murder rates due to our current Prohibition is to . . . rewrite the National Firearms Act and restrict guns even further. Oh and crack down even harder on drugs.

[GreenStormCloud]

5. What about the guns smuggled in from other countries?

The cartels smuggle in most of their guns through Guatemala, (Cold war leftovers), or from North Korea and China. (Cheaper, genuine, AK-47s and RPGs - NOT semi-auto only overpriced clones.) What are the Caravan for Peace doing about them?

[DanTex]

8. There's not much evidence of guns coming in large numbers from anywhere other than the US.

There's been some speculation about Central America, for things like explosives that you can't get in the US easily, but all the hard data points to the US as the main source for guns.

[gejohnston]

9. not speculation

the issue came up in a Wikileaks dump, among other places. Latin American media outlets have been reporting on it for years. Not only explosives, but machine guns, assault rifles, and other NFA items.

[4th law of robotics]

11. I'd be curious to see how many were guns legally sold to the Mexican military

in and deal arranged by our government that somehow "fell off a truck" and ended up in the cartels hands.

[rDigital]

26. Bingo. nt

[Remmah2]

12. Fun with numbers

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110209-mexicos-gun-supply-and-90-percent-myth

"There has clearly been a long and well-documented history of arms smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border, but it is important to recognize that, while the United States is a significant source of certain classes of weapons and ammunition, it is by no means the source of 90 percent of the weapons used by the Mexican cartels, as is commonly asserted."


The drug cartels don't limit themselves to murder by firearms either. Beheadings, arson..............

[DanTex]

14. Most of the guns come from the US, though maybe not 90%.

Since it's an incomplete sample, the actual percentage may be less than 90% (or more), but the evidence points to the US as the major source.

We can’t conclude, therefore — and neither can anyone else — that 90 percent of all the crime-related firearms recovered in Mexico come from the U.S. Nevertheless, Houser (chief of the ATF's National Tracing Center) said that in his view, the claim is correct. "The government of Mexico says that virtually all of the guns that they recover come from the United States. … I’ve been down there. Other agents have been down there. A lot of agents are there in the vicinity. They haven’t seen any indication of any significant number of foreign-made guns whatsoever and the trace information seems to corroborate it. From what we know about gun trafficking, it makes sense to us. Who’s the nearest manufacturer of firearms? The United States."

And Houser thinks the debate over the precise number isn’t productive. "It seems so obvious to me that I find it difficult to believe that everybody’s gotten so wound up about this," he said. "I mean, just for last year, what happens if it were 85 percent of the guns that came from the United States? Does that make much difference? Not really."

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/05/more-on-mexican-guns/

[GreenStormCloud]

16. 62% of guns seized were NOT submitted for tracing.

That statistic is from your own link. Of the 38% that were submitted, 90% did come from the U.S. The article speculates on some reasons why guns were not submitted, but that is pure speculation. I would speculate that they didn't bother to submit a gun with Cyrillic lettering, Chinese characters, or Arabic script on it.

Go to this link to see a photo of gun seized in Mexico. http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=31932&pageid=89&pagename=Features There are bunches of new belt-fed machineguns in the foreground. You can't buy those in American gun shops.

According to the GAO report, some 30,000 firearms were seized from criminals by Mexican authorities in 2008. Of these 30,000 firearms, information pertaining to 7,200 of them (24 percent) was submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for tracing. Of these 7,200 guns, only about 4,000 could be traced by the ATF, and of these 4,000, some 3,480 (87 percent) were shown to have come from the United States.

This means that the 87 percent figure relates to the number of weapons submitted by the Mexican government to the ATF that could be successfully traced and not from the total number of weapons seized by Mexican authorities or even from the total number of weapons submitted to the ATF for tracing. In fact, the 3,480 guns positively traced to the United States equals less than 12 percent of the total arms seized in Mexico in 2008 and less than 48 percent of all those submitted by the Mexican government to the ATF for tracing. This means that almost 90 percent of the guns seized in Mexico in 2008 were not traced back to the United States.

Please notice that my numbers are not made up by the NRA but come from the GOA and ATF.

Further, why would a cartel pay hundreds of dollars for a U.S. semi-auto knock-off of an AK-47 when they can smuggle in a genuine select-fire AK-47 for under $100?

[Union Scribe]

20. Thank you for the illuminating posts. nt

[glacierbay]

29. Kinda blows his comments

out of the water.

[rDigital]

27. From the U.S. doesn't

necessarily mean from U.S. gun-stores or civilian private purchase. These could be government sold weapons. Like another poster stated, you can't buy a new belt-fed machine gun from any store in the U.S.

[hack89]

28. Central America is awash with military weapons after years of civil war and drug violence

why would the cartels pay $1500 for a semi-auto AR-15 in America when they can get a fully auto AK-47 for a fraction of the cost?

[glacierbay]

15. Well, I guess if you count the firearms that we give to the Mexican Armed Forces

you might have a point, but as far as things like full auto AK-47's, SAW's, RPG's, machine pistols, then, no, those come from south of Mexico's border as has been documented.

[Remmah2]

17. The drug cartel even uses airplanes and submarines.

Violence and corruption, guess those were exported from the US too.

[Oneka]

18. Indeed, the US, not US gun shows.

The Department of State has weighed in officially on whether the sale of military weapons to Mexico through U.S. private-sector arms exporters might be a source of the high-caliber firearms now being employed by drug trafficking organizations in the bloody drug war south of the border.

The response is not very reassuring.

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2009/04/private-sector-arms-sales-mexico-sparsely-monitored-state-department

The corporate media narrative describes the scale of drug violence being due in large part because US gunshow sales and smugglers carrying guns easy-to-buy in the U.S. to Mexico. This is false. Read this to learn why.

http://friendsofbradwill.org/2009/05/438/

I wonder if the Caravan plans to swing through State Department headquarters, when it travels to DC. They may want to ask a few "hard questions" of state department officials.

[rl6214]

7. So you agree with their proposals?

"Among the proposals: a voluntary code of conduct for gun dealers to stop arms trafficking to Mexico. Opponents at city council argued U.S. gun laws are tough enough.

“You lie on this form. You go to jail,” said Lisa Turner about the penalty facing gun buyers who provide false information to gun store"



" The other is legalizing some drugs.

“We need to get over the fear that drives many of these politicians to say we can’t even talk about legalization,” said Dean Becker, with LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition."

I think these would help, especially legalizing some drugs. Even they know more gun laws won't work.

[Remmah2]

10. Tell the ATF to enforce existing laws; good idea.

Nothing new about these concepts.

"Among the proposals: a voluntary code of conduct for gun dealers to stop arms trafficking to Mexico. Opponents at city council argued U.S. gun laws are tough enough.

“You lie on this form. You go to jail,” said Lisa Turner about the penalty facing gun buyers who provide false information to gun stores."

[PavePusher]

13. I'll really believe they're serious....

when they take their little sideshow to Mexico and try to convince the Mexicans to stop breaking their own laws by buying U.S. guns.

[Clames]

19. The same lie. Over and over and over...

...is still a lie.

n 1994 the United States passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, barring the manufacture and importation of assault weapons for civilian use.

[cherokeeprogressive]

21. A 90' tall tower every 500 yards equipped with night vision scopes, with motion sensors in between.

Stop ALL traffic going either way.

For regular border crossings, full stops with full searches. For everyone, and every thing.

[gejohnston]

22. I can picture a lot of deer and jaguars

been spotted.

[cherokeeprogressive]

23. Not hard to differentiate between a deer and human at 250 yards or less. n/t

[gejohnston]

24. True, someone could get some cool pics. Would provide a lot of jobs

it would be over 20,000 towers that would have to be manned plus the teams that would go check out sighted humans. Figure three crews for each tower and support.