The New York Times numbingly keeps running the same article about gun sales in Texas and other southwestern states to Mexican drug gangs. This is no longer "news" per se, now it is the kind of drumbeat they once sustained over the gender discrimination at the Masters (if memory serves). Oh, and the reporting they ran emphasizing the need for a war in Iraq, there are certain echoes of that. For such an austere newspaper, their advocacy journalism can be tired, not to mention tiresome.
My guess is that the paper thinks if it keeps running the same article about the danger of guns over and over that there will suddenly be a national movement to regulate guns. Their calculations seem clear--Mexican drug gangs buy American guns, therefore American guns should be regulated to stop Mexican drug violence.
I have this suspicion that if guns couldn't be easily bought in Texas by billionaire drug gangs, they might have to spend marginally more buying superior weaponry from their Latin America connections, who operate in a region awash with guns (many of them from the U.S., see below). It is almost too obvious to point out that it wouldn't take much to push aside a few kilos of coke and add in some weapons.
The Times is without a clue in other ways too, not least of which is the almost total absence of interest in broaching the radioactive gun debate. Obama is far too savvy a politician to do this, at least yet. And now that Dems have started winning in the south, why destroy that with fruitless anti-gun posturing? Why lose Virginia now that it has moved so firmly into the Demcoratic camp?
I haven't seen the article stressing the root cause of the Mexican drug violence, which is, of course, the teenager behind your garage toking up as you read this very blog post (maybe even your son or daughter. Or you).
But it is true that the United States is the cause of much weapons violence in the world. It supplies 38% of the arms sold in the world today.
My guess is that the paper thinks if it keeps running the same article about the danger of guns over and over that there will suddenly be a national movement to regulate guns. Their calculations seem clear--Mexican drug gangs buy American guns, therefore American guns should be regulated to stop Mexican drug violence.
I have this suspicion that if guns couldn't be easily bought in Texas by billionaire drug gangs, they might have to spend marginally more buying superior weaponry from their Latin America connections, who operate in a region awash with guns (many of them from the U.S., see below). It is almost too obvious to point out that it wouldn't take much to push aside a few kilos of coke and add in some weapons.
The Times is without a clue in other ways too, not least of which is the almost total absence of interest in broaching the radioactive gun debate. Obama is far too savvy a politician to do this, at least yet. And now that Dems have started winning in the south, why destroy that with fruitless anti-gun posturing? Why lose Virginia now that it has moved so firmly into the Demcoratic camp?
I haven't seen the article stressing the root cause of the Mexican drug violence, which is, of course, the teenager behind your garage toking up as you read this very blog post (maybe even your son or daughter. Or you).
But it is true that the United States is the cause of much weapons violence in the world. It supplies 38% of the arms sold in the world today.
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