Above: President Felipe Calderon of Mexico, looking a little like my late papa here.
I was one of the people, who was not at all surprised, when Mexican president, Felipe Calderon, told a joint session of Congress that eighty percent of the seventy-five thousand guns seized by Mexican law enforcement, over the last three years, have been traced right here to the United States of America. According to the Associated Press, Calderon, after urging U.S. legislators to strengthen gun laws, warned that over ninety percent of the guns used by [Mexican] drug traffickers come from north of Mexico's border.
I was not surprised because I know what "guns used by drug traffickers" means, and you probably do, too. Even if you think you don't.
Don't get caught up in the political crap-storm brewing over the ninety percent part. The guns being used by the drug traffickers President Calderon spoke of are small arms--handguns--the same our local papers tell us are being used in drug/gang-related crimes, right here in the Distict. Where they are being manufactured and how big the weapons are is irrelevant to me; that the guns are coming from America is what matters.
Trust me...if some punk kid points a gun in your nephew's face or shoots him, walking home from a club, you aren't going to care where on what assembly line that gun was manufactured. You may get a little mad, if you find out it was one in some seventy-five thousand guns smuggled here from Maryland, Atlanta or wherever. In my opinion, that is the part, after the funeral, that's going to make you angry and crazy.
It is that feeling of invasion that is the issue President Calderon is addressing here from a Mexican perspective, and I think we should try to understand that.
For the record, I am not advocating tougher gun laws or anything else, here. Like many Mexican Americans and Afro-Americans, I grew up with guns around the house that my parents taught me how to use, and I'm very comfortable with them. I am almost more comfortable with a sensibly secured firearm at home, than without one, ..but, I can understand why someone in another country doesn't want your guns, regardless of what country manufactured them, pointing at their kids.
Does that appreciation for the constitutional right to defend ourselves make us a bad country? Of course, it doesn't.
People keep coming here, don't they? Did your grandparents think it was a bad country, when they sailed here to escape the Second Serfdom in Poland, ..or when they didn't get on the first boat to Liberia or Puerto Rico or some island, somewhere? We're here, don't want guns pointed in our faces, and we should understand why people in other countries feel the same way.
It annoys me to no end that we can't look at issues like this--we've got a little gun problem, here--without having to clarify with the American exceptionalist, psycho-right that we love our country--that we think our country is a great, big ball of star-spangled sunshine, spreading God and freedom all over the world! I feel like I'm teaching kindergarten, when I have to do that, ..but, sometimes, when we're asking potentially critical questions about something going on in the U.S., it seems we have to do that or risk being called un-American.
For my money, an America that can't be questioned or criticised, under any circumstances, is no America at all.
Anyway, Inner City Press talked to the Small Arms Survey's managing director, Eric Berman, about what percentage of guns in Mexico come from the United States. Here is a link.
Mel Dyer
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