Unless you have a very hard to get license, you can't buy an AK-47 in an American gun shop. You can buy a non-automatic AK-47 look alike but not the real thing.

What's left out is who are the customers of the Mexican drug cartels. Americans.

guns do not cause violence anymore than cars cause accidents

War and weapons bring only misfortune. It's really sad that we need these things. Elektroschrott Ankauf

When a slideshow's byline is "Guns don't need passports to cross the US border," one might expect that the slideshow will involve images and perhaps even (gasp) some reliable information about the numbers and impact of firearms transited over the US border into Mexico. Sure, the first slide's caption pays lip service to the "Fast and Furious" controversy, but little useful information. Instead, for the rest of the slideshow we get a few photos of US gun shows, firearms customers, border patrol agents, and a right-wing governor in the US juxtaposed with images of the Mexican Drug War and seized cartel weapons, and voila, the connection is made, regardless of accuracy.

We see a rifle which purportedly belonged to Beltran-Leyva Kingpin Edgar Villarreal. The rifle is an M4 with a military-issue M203 grenade launcher complete with at least one seized 40mm grenade. An M4 is manufactured as a "select fire" military weapon, and is not available to civilians from US firearms retailers without special licensing and purchase tracking. The attached M203 grenade launcher is strictly military issue, and is not legally available through US firearms retailers to civilians at all, the same goes for its ordnance. We see a couple "Federales" manning what the caption says is a "general purpose machine gun." I'm pretty sure it's actually called a Squad Automatic Weapon. Foreign Policy, next time you prepare a slideshow about firearms, try to choose an editor that knows more about firearms, or who cares enough to learn.

In another photo, we see dozens of seized rifles including lots of M16/M4 style and even what appears to be a Steyr AUG, an FN-Herstal, and an RPG launcher. However, it is difficult if not impossible from the photo to determine whether any of these rifles are manufactured as select-fire military issue (illegal for civilian purchase in the US), or semi-automatic non-select fire variants bought legally in the US by "straw buyers" and illegally transported to Mexico and converted to select fire/full automatic (the clear implication of the slideshow's byline), or whether any of these weapons were purchased legally by the Mexican government and diverted from military armories to the cartels, or whether some of them were full black market goods smuggled directly to the cartels from Guatemala, Vietnam, the Middle East, South Korea, Israel, Spain, and/or the former Soviet bloc.

I'll tell you one thing, that RPG didn't come from any typical US gun shop, and neither did the hand grenades, or the M203 launcher, or the Mexican military uniforms. At least some of the select-fire rifles couldn't have been legally purchased by civilian straw buyers in the US either. Stratfor Global Alliance recently did a study in which they concluded that the number of cartel weapons with US origins ranged between 12% to 48%. So where are the remainder coming from? There were reportedly over 150,000 desertions from the Mexican military from 2003-2009, and many of these deserters take their military-issue weapons with them or raid the armory on the way out, and go directly onto the cartel payrolls. Smugglers bring in thousands of diverted or black market military-grade weapons like fully automatic and select-fire rifles, grenades, launchers, and high explosives by sea or over the Guatemalan border. Many of these weapons were provided by the US to guerilla groups during the Cold War, and are now available for black market purchase, and others are licensed knock-offs and foreign military contracts diverted to the international black and gray markets.
None of these black and gray market processes are easy to trace, and reliable information is hard to come by.

Nevertheless, this slide show is designed to imply that all these weapons have origins in the legal US firearms market, and hence, the problem would be solved if only the US would tighten restrictions on legal purchases. That is extremely unlikely, but you wouldn't know it from this rubbish slideshow.
If we want to make wise policy in combating the cartels, we should quit obsessing over the origin of their weapons. Anybody with pockets as deep as the cartels are going to get them one way or another. If you've got a choice between paying a lackey to buy a handful of legal weapons in the US, smuggle the weapon and its ammunition across the border, convert the weapon to select-fire, and remove any identifying marks, versus paying a smuggler a lower per-unit price for bulk shipments of thousands of virtually untraceable fully automatic military grade weapons from the international black market, which would you choose? The cartels buy weapons from the US because they can, not because they need to. The US is just one more source, and perhaps not even the primary source for most of the cartels' meanest weapons.

Slideshows like this only politicize the issue while providing little useful information, and no sense of the issue's full complexity.

As long as there is money to be made getting illegal products over the border there will be people killing each other to get the money that it makes.
Sure there are alot of laws and policies that need to be reviewed.
Instead of fixing the problems the US government will just add more and more policies, instead of fixing the problem.
So in other words, we will continue to put the band-aids on the problems instead of fixing the root of the problem.

Americans wish to see the drug problem as mostly a mexican problem, and when it comes to the violence caused by its even more so. its those uncivilized countries like mexico where they kill each other like animals.Yet if your a good ol' american capitalist then you should be able to squarely see that as long as such a big consuming drug market "america" exists then there will always be people or groups that are going to capitalize on that and there is very little that any government can do. Just with most strong market forces. Then to add some icing on the cake you add the huge gun manufacturing companies that profit from selling "ridiculous" types and amounts of guns, which accompanied by lax gun buying laws in the US create an easy way for them to get in the hands of cash rich mexican narcos... On which comes the cherry on top of the icing which is the US governments pressure on the Mexican government to fight the drug cartels that have srpung up with tons of money and guns. Yeahh alright some guns were bought on the black market or what not but the big picture is clear. naturally with these elements you get the current disaster happening in Mexico. Its obvious that yo cannot win the war against the cartels any more the US can win in Afganistan. They only way to stop the violence is the posture taken by Peru and Colombia, let the drugs flow. Where there is a lot less violence but just as much drug production. Try to contain it as much as possible, but let it flow out of their countries into the consuming countries. Just as the US lets guns flow into mexico...

One way to put a stop to this violence would be to legalize the drugs that these gangs are making huge fortunes with. This would bring the prices down and leave less money in the hands of those who are so willing to kill at all costs. American's still know how to get their hands on these drugs no matter how much blood is split before they reach us.

Thanks for all the details. I suspected as much but it would have taken me a year and a day to figure out what was what. My products: caldaie vaillant.

And Palestinian land will shrink, suicide bombers will respond, rockets will be launched and Israelis killed. Now Hezbollah and Sunnis have started up again in Lebanon. And Iran is powering up its nuclear capacity. Israel may feel impelled to react at some point if it calculates either Lebanon or Iran needs to be nipped in the bud. Add Syria to the toxic mix in Lebanon; and if things boil over there then Palestine will be left to sit and stew on the perennial international back burner. Hope, at this point, is not even a diamond in the rough. porno porno porno porno web tasarım