Narco-Blogger Beats Mexico Drug War News Blackout 518
An anonymous reader writes "An anonymous, twentysomething blogger is giving Mexicans what they can't get elsewhere — an inside view of their country's raging drug war. Operating from behind a thick curtain of computer security, Blog del Narco in less than six months has become Mexico's go-to Internet site at a time when mainstream media are feeling pressure and threats to stay away from the story. Many postings, including warnings and a beheading, appear to come directly from drug traffickers. Others depict crime scenes accessible only to military or police."
American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:0, Insightful)
I hope the "second ammendment remedies" crowd is proud.
Where do you think the guns that fuel this bloodbath are coming from??
The guns that fuel Mexico's bloody drug war come from the United States of America, where we are apparently just a little too dumb for sensible gun control. I guess you never know when you will need an M-16 with a large clip to take down your own country's elected government. Nevermined the consequences or the fact that you would be dead before you even reloaded your weapon.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:2, Insightful)
The guns that fuel Mexico's bloody drug war come from the United States of America, where we are apparently just a little too dumb for sensible gun control.
And the money to pay for them comes from drug sales.
People who pay for dope should realize that they are funding a network of gangs and cartels that murders far more people than the more familiar flavor of terrorist does. Ideally we would decriminalize the drugs and thereby yank the support out from under these people. But that ain't going to happen, so if you happen to use recreational drugs, please do your fellow man a favor and stop.
It's refreshing (Score:5, Insightful)
Then I started diggin in alternate sources, such as blog del narco, and damn, was I missing out on all the news!
Just recently I bumped into this story [bbc.co.uk] about Ciudad Juarez. The story both gives hope and scares the crap out of you. No sign of that story on the two most widely spread newspapers in Mexico, though. They're just sweeping it under the rug.
I wonder if blog del narco featured it...
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope the "second ammendment remedies" crowd is proud.
Where do you think the guns that fuel this bloodbath are coming from??
The guns that fuel Mexico's bloody drug war come from the United States of America, where we are apparently just a little too dumb for sensible gun control. I guess you never know when you will need an M-16 with a large clip to take down your own country's elected government. Nevermined the consequences or the fact that you would be dead before you even reloaded your weapon.
The drugs are completely illegal in both Mexico and the USA. How's that been working out when it comes to eliminating them? What makes you believe that making guns completely illegal in both countries is going to work out better? When we finally figure out a way to keep drugs out of highly controlled environments like prisons, maybe then we can worry about the US-Mexico border.
I'll never understand why anyone even humors positions like prohibition and gun control. We've tried both for a long time now, more than long enough to iron out any implementation errors. They simply don't work. Acknowledge that and maybe we can come up with something that might work.
Oh, and apparently tyrants everywhere do fear armed civilians. That's why Hitler and every other "successful" dictator made it a top priority to first disarm the citizens. There can be no more honest explanation of this than a hard look at what the tyrants themselves considered a threat to their rule.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll stop buying drugs as soon as everyone else stops buying diamonds.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a really pro-gun person, but really, considering they're selling something that's illegal to make, traffic and sell... I can't see them having a hard time making, trafficking or selling guns either if they were illegal.
Especially with the news of numerous corrupt police and government officials in the whole drug war, I can't see it being too hard for them to 'somehow' get a bunch of military weapons if they needed to.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why you only buy locally grown.
Re:It's refreshing (Score:4, Insightful)
One thing that everybody must consider, is that every news source (including Blog del Narco) has its own agenda.
Even the different newspapers and TV channels have their own allegiances, so you must read multiple news sources to get an approximation of the truth.
-
Another Mexican living in Mexico
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:5, Insightful)
The US is, in fact, a pretty decent place for civilians to buy moderately zesty firearms without too much hassle. However, the US government also has a habit of handing out all sorts of military-grade goodies to governments it considers to be friends and allies.
Mexican security forces, for reasons that aren't all that hard to understand, has had some trouble stemming corruption and even the flow of former personnel into cartel forces. "Los Zetas [wikipedia.org]" for instance, are largely ex-security forces, now working for the cartels.
Obviously, there is no point in arguing that none of the guns being used in Mexico are of US origin. That is almost certainly wrong, I suspect a reasonable percentage of them are. The question, though, is are they diverted hardware from the American civilian market or are they American military aid being lost because of Mexican government corruption? Both types are "American Guns"; but they have very different policy implications...
fuckin a (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Drugs are the cause.
Bzzt! Drug prohibition is the cause.
History Repeating (Score:5, Insightful)
I die a little inside every time I hear a story about drug gangs basically taking over cities in Mexico and kidnapping people. Think of the people women whose husbands have been kidnapped and they receive pieces of them with ransom notes asking for money that they don't have. This is what could've happened if they kept up alcohol prohibition. Drug prohibition is just as ill-conceived. The better we do reducing supply, the higher the prices go, and the more vicious the drug gangs get in protecting their business.
It's a terrible cycle, and one that can only be broken by regulation. They need to make drugs legal through special outlets stocked with health care workers, where people can safely obtain their drugs and use the proceeds to pay for the addiction specialists and treatment centers. There's nothing we can do except address the problem of addiction, and treat such users as patients, not criminals. Is it perfect? Probably not, but it's a start.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:3, Insightful)
When a prisoner can make a gun in a high security prison yes.. guns can be made pretty much anywhere.
Was that particular gun a great one? No.. but it was made under some pretty serious materials control and without the advantage of some very helpful tools, under what are supposed to be some pretty watchful eyes. Firearms are a genie that are well past being out of the lamp. Closing your eyes and wishing really hard won't make them go away.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:1, Insightful)
Most of them are being shipped south across the border. They need something to haul back after they sell all the drugs up here, after all.
Prohibition and regulation are different (Score:1, Insightful)
I'll never understand why anyone even humors positions like prohibition and gun control. We've tried both for a long time now, more than long enough to iron out any implementation errors. They simply don't work. Acknowledge that and maybe we can come up with something that might work.
Prohibition didn't work, but we still regulate alcohol. Drunk driving, drinking age, liquor licenses, and more. Disarming the citizenry is a bad idea, but that doesn't mean guns can't be regulated.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:1, Insightful)
...83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S.
It may be relevant to ask "of the guns that could be traced, what percentage were traced to the US?" The answer to that question appears to be, "most of them," specifically 87% as cited above, or 95% as cited several years ago. Without some evidence to the contrary, the guns that could not be traced at all might be from anywhere, the US included. The inability to trace the weapon does not preclude it coming from the U.S. Rather, without more information it's hard to say where it came from. More information, even information doesn't definitively tell us where the gun came from, could shed a little light on the issue. For example, knowing the model and age of the weapon, or where/how it was confiscated, might help someone guess, but we don't seem to have that information, and it would at any rate be difficult to analyze even if we did have the information.
It may be fair to speculate that FOX is choosing this statistic to confuse the subject, implying as it does so that most of the guns aren't from the U.S. even though the data do not support that conclusion -- the data merely fail to absolutely preclude the possibility. (I doubt many of the regular FOX viewers I know would be interested in this subtle but crucial distinction. I get the feeling that a lot of people watch FOX because they enjoy the comfy anti-reality bubble it projects in to their living rooms.)
Re:El Blog del Narco (Score:3, Insightful)
http://translate.google.com/ [google.com]
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is GP labeled troll? Simply because he has a different opinion?
Re:fuckin a (Score:2, Insightful)
Hell all latinamerican expresidents agree. The key is in the ex part....
Just like in the us.
Re:History Repeating (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look at it another way, they learned quite a bit. They learned that there are few better justifications for the expansion of police power, a campaign issue that can be used whenever needed, the creation of new bureaucracies, etc. They later figured out that the sheer number of prosecutions resulting from various forms of prohibition were great for the private prison industry.
I am reminded of that quote about having abundant solar energy as soon as the utility companies solve one technical problem: how to run a sunbeam through a meter. I don't know how feasible abundant solar energy actually is, but this is a great caricacture of a mentality that needs to be understood. You're dealing with something just like it when you get down to the root of prohibition.
The government that wants to expand is only too happy to be asked to solve such "problems" but this goes unnoticed because too many people have their own reasons for supporting it. Your solution is reasonable and easily the best way to handle the whole affair. It doesn't deny the painfully obvious, which is that the way we have been approaching the issue doesn't work. You just have to solve one technical problem: how to address the visceral satisfaction some obtain from the suffering of anyone who offends their Puritannical views.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Very Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's refreshing (Score:4, Insightful)
That's right.
There's a war in Mexico, and the soldiers routinely cross-over to US territory, kidnap citizens, and drag them back to Mexico. Or just outright kill them. Washington DC used to be the murder capitol of the nation, but now it's been eclipsed by Phoenix Arizona. (Phoenix is also the #1 city for kidnapping.) It's a sad state of affairs.
[Deleted paragraph about closing the border.] I've decided to self-censor myself because I'm tired of being marked "troll". Heaven forbid I share my Jeffersonian views in public (i.e. defense of self, defense of home, defense of country is a right), so I'll just keep them to myself.
.
Oh and I agree that legalizing marijuana/cocaine growing in the US would basically end the war. Mexican and South American druglords could no longer fund their wars without that money. They would die-off like the bootleggers died-off after Alcohol was legalized. Across the ocean, the EU state of Portugal(?) legalized drugs and opened-up addiction centers to help people get cured, and the drug-related crime plummeted to almost nothing.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:1, Insightful)
You are missing the point.
The point is: The NRA and other weapons-industry lobby groups don't care about the Second Amendment, they care about PROFITS. And it is profitable to use the Second Amendment as part of a straw-man argument to keep states and/or the federal government from enacting legislation which would both PRESERVE the Second Amendment AND make it more DIFFICULT for Mexican drug cartels (and probably felons here in the U.S.) to purchase MASS QUANTITIES of weapons.
Here is an analogy: Freedom of speech is still preserved when there are laws against things like yelling "fire" in crowded theaters. Similarly, there COULD be legislation which would preserve gun rights and also make it harder for guns to be funnelled into the Mexican drug wars. Except that, because it is extremely PROFITABLE, the weapons companies which fund the NRA et al don't want to see that happen. And, of course, "gun rights" (i.e., the cynical manipulation of genuine sentiment, as opposed to actual legislation and political action to guarantee our Second Amendment rights) is red meat for the base of conservative politicians. So there is most likely a political calculus involved as well.
Note that NOTHING I am talking about has to do with encroaching on Second Amendment rights.
If this doesn't make sense to you, then either you don't understand or you refuse to.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:2, Insightful)
It seemed to work for us Canadians, personally not putting the powers life and death into the hands of every punk on the streets just makes sense to me.
You cannot stop all murders but if you make it so that it is harder for people to kill other people then just pointing and pulling a trigger I think it is a good thing.
and sure giving less guns to citizens can make it harder to kill the leaders of the country, but do you want single/small groups of people to be able to kill the leader of their country? Their are always dissidents no matter how fair and good the rule is do, so does it make sense to give them the power to effect an entire nation?
but in the end guns are no different then any other weapons conceptually, the point is were do you stop? Maybe no one should be allowed anything that is only used as a lethal/highly damaging weapon, maybe normal everyday people would be able to own automatic rifles and military explosives; Maybe they should even be allowed tactical missiles or weapons of mass destruction.
All I know is I do not want to live anywhere near anyone that has a weapon that will almost assume my death any time he chooses.
Re:fuckin a (Score:4, Insightful)
Legalize it all damn ready. Seriously, executive order, make it happen.
Presidents have learned not to mess with black ops budgets.
Besides, once Mexico fails, we can have a good old-fashioned land war, 'save' the Mexican people, and add more payers into our entitlement programs. What could possibly go wrong?
Phoney Statistics (Score:1, Insightful)
I wonder how traceable a gun with no serial number is.
I assume that it's standard procedure to remove the gun's serial number In order to protect the gun purchaser in the United States.
How many of the guns in your biased article's survey have serial numbers?? Oh wait, your sources are shills for the weapon manufacturers and the NRA. And you believe it cuz you like guns. Good for you.
American guns are causing an epic bloodbath in Mexico. Not just assault rifles that can easily be converted to full automatic. Handguns are also flooding accross the border from the United States.
The NRA has blood on it's hands, and the people who instinctively oppose serious gun control should think about how much blood is being spilled by American guns.
Even if your phoney statistics were based in reality, almost every gun used to kill an American in the United States was purchased legally at some point.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the GP is correct. It is prohibition and the resulting corruption of the authorities that is causing the bloodshed. We haven't learned the lesson of alcohol prohibition yet. So the war will continue until then. This is not an NRA issue at all. It should be a lesson of how power corrupts. Legalize now, and the gangs will be out of business before the week is out.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:5, Insightful)
How many alcohol cartels are out killing people right now? Only where there is prohibition do you have this problem. The demand will always be there. In fact it's possible the cartels are the ones who threaten politicians if they don't impose prohibition to begin with. Oh damn! I just made your point. Well, I suppose we could organize a boycott... Then again you could read up on the Opium Wars of the 1850s..
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:1, Insightful)
We need an international effort to legalize personal production of all personally produceable drugs. Not public consumption, not a blanket for junkies, but just a way for people to use their freedom in NOT helping the cartels.
I'm not taking a stance in the "legalize it" debate. But I would point out that you already have a way to use your freedom to not help the cartels. You could choose not to purchase drugs. I'm not saying that it's necessarily reasonable to ask people that do drugs to stop because of the behind the scenes horrors, but to say they DON'T have that ability is untrue.
Re:It's refreshing (Score:2, Insightful)
Mexican wikileaks...
Re:History Repeating (Score:5, Insightful)
There's better ways to handle it. There's a lot of different things to try. But we've been doing the exact same thing for over 50 years and it's only gotten worse. We've been burning our hand on the stove every day for decades, and still haven't learned from it.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:1, Insightful)
Bullshit. Ignorant misstatement of history. Hitler disarmed the people. He rearmed the German army, which was not supposed to happen after WWI. Two very different things.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:2, Insightful)
I cannot envision a world where there is no demand for recreational drugs.
I can. Stop raising generations of people who believe that the only acceptable state of a human being is happiness, and they will live normal lives doing whatever they will find interesting.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:5, Insightful)
"100 years ago there was no way to internationally distribute drugs on a large scale."
Oh yes, there was:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars [wikipedia.org]
And also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_cola#Coca_.E2.80.94_cocaine [wikipedia.org]
And please don't tell me modern art, music and culture could have evolved the way they did without recreational drug use. I don't care about "the children" for that reason alone, because I can not and will not protect everyone's children from all dangers. This is not anyone's responsibility but their parent's and no one but them can ever hope to fulfill that but them.
The liquor store on the corner sells hard spirits. 40%, 80%, you name it. One small bottle would kill a child. We sell it to adults only. If anyone gives it to a kid that dies, they go to jail for the rest of their lives.
The gas station sells highly flammable, toxic liquids. A kid could easily burn or kill themselves with that stuff. We sell it to adults only, same deal. We also have cars, power tools, gas-fired stoves, sharp knives, open fireplaces, barbecue pits and lawn darts. And somehow we only outlawed the lawn darts because they looked like kid's toys, instead of entire generations of kids surviving them.
Anyhow, I will absolutely resist outlawing things that have a purpose for adults for the reason that they're dangerous to kids. I am not a kid, I will protect my own kids from danger and I cannot accept if people want to transform the world into a padded cell that is safe for kids.
If free men own guns and slaves don't, free men can definitely grow plants in their own backyards and eat them.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hitler didn't rearm the GERMANS, he re-armed the German ARMY. That is the first major difference to consider.
Second: the Nazis in 1938
1) completely disarmed Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and anyone that was "untrustworthy" to the gun control authorities, which hit of course communists, intellectuals and people showing a faint idea of resistance.
2) disallowed innocent civilians from carrying a usable weapon
3) allowed Nazi Party officials and members of their organization to *freely* carry guns without any permit at all.
I think that can be called a three-pronged approach to the Nazis ultimate goals, can it?
Disarm Jews, disallow civilians from carrying guns, allow SS members to own and carry guns without any permit at all.
We know how well that worked out towards the Final Solution.
Sorry for not completely translating http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entwaffnung_der_deutschen_Juden [wikipedia.org] for everyone, maybe the Google translations can be read...
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:4, Insightful)
People who pay taxes should realize that they are funding a network of gangs and cartels that murders far more people than the more familiar flavor of terrorist does
There, fixed that for you. Our government has a good track record of going into other countries, identifying future terrorists and despots, and giving them guns. Your pot hookup? Probably contributed less to the Taliban than Uncle Sam.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:2, Insightful)
You know, if someone is intent and willing to kill for drugs or money, then then I don't think it is too far a stretch to think that that person would kill for less. So legalize drugs;sell it legally in some shop. The cartels kill the competition when it is legal. Why would they all of a sudden become better people and let the legal competition slide?
Nothing would change, other than maybe freeing money and resources from prosecution to hunt and kill cartel members.
I'm all for drug legalization. But to think that it (legalization) will somehow make shitty murderous people better is pretty naive.
So they will kill you for your iPod or whatever makes them money.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:5, Insightful)
You should be ashamed of such a blatant misrepresentation of facts. There is an obvious difference between the re-arming of the German army and the dis-arming of the German citizenry. Sadly, most people that read your post will not have noticed and will now be able to spread your ignorance further.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Mq5wQIFJE2YJ:www.stephenhalbrook.com/article-nazilaw.pdf [googleusercontent.com]
(Not an unbiased article, to be sure, but it does have all the references necessary to disprove your claim in the footnotes.)
Re:History Repeating (Score:3, Insightful)
And, once you get beyond the legality, most people are capable of managing addiction. I am addicted to a substance which causes physical withdrawal symptoms if I don't take any for more than about a day, as are quite a few people that I know. I take some when I wake up, and then some more in the late afternoon. It doesn't impair my ability to function in normal society, and I'm not out committing crimes to get my next fix.
The substance in question is caffeine, and I prefer to enjoy it in the form of a large cup of coffee that I can drink slowly while looking out over the sea. If I don't have any coffee for a couple of days, I get amazingly painful headaches, become very lethargic, and feel sick for about a day.
Oddly enough, this drug is legal, while a number that are not addictive are illegal.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:1, Insightful)
Money makes a big difference. Stealing iPods isn't as lucrative as the drug trade, or even if it is there is only so much money that can be extracted from each activity without diminishing returns. Drugs are a major funding source of organized crime. If you remove that source of funds, the crime will probably try to move to other areas, but those areas will not be as profitable because if they were, the crime would have already moved to those areas without legalization of drugs. The end result is less money for organized crime, and that makes the organization harder to maintain, since there is less incentive to partake of the crime, and it makes the organization less effective. E.g. there may no longer be money to buy off politicians and cops, or at least not as many, and the actually intelligent people who orchestrate the whole thing may be able to make a better living working 9-5 at a bank or something like that. Removing funding from crime is good in the same way that destroying the economy of your enemy is helpful if you are in war with them - they then have less resources to be an effective enemy to you.
To engage your exact point, yes, bad people aren't going to become rose gardeners just like that. Still, many people on the fringes of organized crime will withdraw their services when there is no longer money to pay them. The bad people will become much less of a problem when they are not backed by a support structure bought for millions of dollars. With less money in the system, there is less incentive to join, making it a less appealing career for young people who might then choose to avoid that world entirely. With the apparently heavy death toll in this business, recruitment to make people bad must be an important factor in keeping organized crime alive.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:5, Insightful)
"All legalization would do in the US is increase consumption."
Bullshit. As with alcohol, consumption tops out at whatever level consumers prefer.
Back in the 1970s, when weed didn't have the absurd legal consequences attached to it (and head shops were extremely common) getting high was perfectly normal in many areas. It didn't cause any trouble,and if the cops found any on you they often poured it out (or, ahem, confiscated it) and told you to move on. Weed was easier to get than booze if you were young, and since it is vastly more pleasant than the nasty buzz of alcohol, most of a generation smoked it.
Paying millions of dollars to bust and incarcerate pot smokers isn't intelligent social policy. It is driven be religionist loathing of any pleasure they do not control. The fanatical pseudo-moralist streak in America drives policies that exist for their own sake, don't facilitate their professed goals, and waste billions of our tax dollars.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Just out of curiosity, what do people who live out in the middle of nowhere do to defend themselves against thieves? It's one thing when the police are minutes away in the city, but in the outback, I'm sure that's not always the case.
Two answers.
One: our thieves by and large don't have guns because they're not trivial to come by for petty criminals. In the US, any citizen can get a gun so they're more widely available.
Two: our cultures by and large aren't fed by fear. B&Es are rare. The odds of actually getting broken into if you don't live in a slum are pretty low. We're not constantly living in fear. Funny, that.
Bonus answer number three: in our cultures, killing someone who's trying to steal your TV isn't considered reasonable response. This isn't the Wild West.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:3, Insightful)
That assumes that they are killing because it's good times and not to protect their own lives and/or business interests, which seems unlikely.
If drugs were legal you wouldn't need to kill to eliminate competition, you wouldn't need to kill to protect yourself from law enforcement and you wouldn't need to kill to protect your product; not only would you not NEED to kill to accomplish those ends, killing wouldn't even be the most efficient way. Once the law in on your side you can ruin a man AND get all his money AND come out of it being the Good Guy. Someone steals your drugs? The police look into it for you, and the stuff was insured even if they don't find it.
It's not like you don't have a pretty good model [wikipedia.org] to see that your stance isn't realistic.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:We aren't crazy (Score:4, Insightful)
No, but I know many people who have a gun "for self defense" who live in rural areas with nearly no, or no violent crime rate other than domestic violence which is actually made worse by gun ownership. They aren't out shooting innocent people. But they are living in a form of fear.
We don't lock our doors. the cops occasionally have something to do in our area, but it's rare. Living life in preparation for an exceedingly unlikely event is paranoia. Paranoia may increase survivability for a very small number of people for whom the very unlikely becomes a reality, but if you aren't one of them, it makes your life worse.
Watching the news makes us americans paranoid. I live in maine and the few violent crimes we do have get plenty of airplay. You'd think it was common if you just watched the news and didn't think too deeply. It's easy to forget that the stories we are hearing are ALL of them, and there are a lot of people in this state who have never even heard a gunshot fired other than during hunting season or target practice.
The fantasy the OP was referring to was the fantasy that most of us outside of major metro areas are ever, ever, ever going to want or need a gun for defense. Within major metro areas, it would be easier and better to call a cop and run.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:2, Insightful)
>Fuck this nanny state shit.
>Tax the fuck out of people that want to do things that are unhealthy for them.
You do realise these are competing viewpoints, right? Taxing people for doing things you consider unhealthy or morally 'wrong' (sin tax) is nannying. "No no, you mustn't do that" "If you dont want to pay the extra taxes, you'll be a better person and quit all that nasty smoking!"
Re:Phoney Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how traceable a gun with no serial number is.
Very. Acid can be used to recover a filed-off serial number. It is a basic forensics technique.
Oh wait, your sources are shills for the weapon manufacturers and the NRA. And you believe it cuz you like guns. Good for you.
And you dismiss his source "cuz you [hate] guns. Good for you." See? Other people can play at that too. Of course, you didn't do what he did; he actually made a point and backed it up. You're just sitting there whining because he doesn't agree with you.
almost every gun used to kill an American in the United States was purchased legally at some point
And every car and beer that leads to a DUI vehicular homicide were purchased legally. Only their owners' irresponsible and illegal use of them differentiates them from the perfectly legal ones safely used every day. So, naturally we should ban them all ...
American guns are causing an epic bloodbath in Mexico
No. People are pulling those triggers. Criminals motivated by lucrative drug trade and protected by a corrupt government are pulling those triggers, and you and I both know that they source their weapons from any number of sources, many of which are not American.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm all for drug legalization. But to think that it (legalization) will somehow make shitty murderous people better is pretty naive.
It's not that legalization would make "shitty murderous people" better, it would make "shitty murderous" behavior less profitable. Unless you want to believe that such behavior is entirely genetic and only is committed by "bad" people, and that no one gets enticed into such bad behavior because it is the most lucrative opportunity available to them, then it is entirely reasonable to assume that policy which makes bad behavior less lucrative will over time will lead to less of that behavior.
Re:American Guns!! Yay NRA!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Take a shower, groom yourself and don't pass out in parks with a needle sticking out of your feet and you won't be looked down upon.