citadel

My head hurts.

Of course there's guns there. What there isn't is many guns legally in private hands. I'm also going to guess you're only talking about certain parts of the Middle East.

OK, I found a point I can agree with you on. The history of gun control is racist. Other than that...you're making the rest of us look bad.

Uh, that was correct. They were referring to SCOTUS appointments, and if you remember, Heller was decided with a single vote majority.

The NRA isn't even close to the most potent or even right-leaning gun rights group in the US. JPFO, GOA, SAF, and others have done much more to make changes to the gun laws that favor private gun ownership than the NRA. Charlton Heston supported the Gun Control Act of 1968.

It's playing with numbers. Suicides are what tips that scale. About half the suicides in the US are done with guns, and are often lumped in with the "gun violence" numbers. Japan has a much higher suicide rate than the US, just with means other than guns.

If you compare CDC numbers with the Brady Campaign "kids killed by guns" numbers (a gunrights group did the side by side, I forget who, it;s online somewhere) they include "children" up to age 19 (the age that captures the 1st 3 years of the males aged 16-25 involvement in violent crime in the US), and include people shot by the police, shot by citizens defending themselves, shot by other young criminals, etc. It's a numbers game, about who can lie the most with statistics.

I'm assuming you're referring to guns used inside the US? No, legal availability isn't a factor. The people obtaining them aren't legally allowed to possess or carry them in the first place due to young age, criminal record, lack of license, and so on. They aren't being obtained legally in almost 100% of the circumstances.

Ha. The cartels are recruiting Mexican soldiers who happily drive off their base with all of the guns, training and equipment provided by their military.

The laws only affect the people who obey them. Career criminals don't get jobs as software engineers because they failed a NICS check. A huge number of the crime guns in the US are stolen, but the vast majority of them aren't traced at all. Of the ones that are traced, ATF only reports the data for the ones traced successfully, meaning ones legally brought into the US, with legible numbers, where the manufacturer/FFL files were kept current and available.

Not really. You can get a semi-auto AK in the US for $400-600 retail, with a legal papertrail and attention from ATF if you buy in bulk. You can get full auto whatever you want on the international black market at wholesale cost. More gun for less money, with no one putting your driver's license number on a 4473.

The chart is based on guns seized, submitted to US law enforcement for tracing (meaning someone said "Hey, this gun looks like it came from the US"), and successfully traced by US law enforcement, who only have access to databases of info compiled in the US. This is a very narrow window.

I bet if we went to a busy shopping mall and started writing down VIN numbers of every car we saw, then contacted Ford to trace all of them, they'd only be able to trace some of them...because Ford doesn't keep track of Chevy's VIN's, just Ford's. And naturally, a large percentage of the cars successfully traced in such a manner would come back to Ford, because...Ford had those records. The same circular logic is being applied here.

Also, notice how they only specify that guns "originated" in the US. That could mean manufactured, exported, made for the military, etc. What it's being interpreted as is "guns originally bought in the US at a gun store by a private individual who turned around and gave it to the cartels as part of a scheme." That's just not the case. Most of the legally available guns popular in the US aren't popular with vicious cartel hitmen.

Huh? These numbers are on guns seized in Mexico by notoriously corrupt Mexican law enforcement. Then they ask the US to tell them where guns came from based on records maintained in the US.

The US buys tons of drugs, that's no secret. Obviously American's will pay for coke and weed with dollar bills, not Yen or Euros.

Every other source. The cottage industry of copyright infringing copies of guns made in Asia without serial numbers, guns bought or stolen internationally outside of the channels that care about paperwork and laws, all kinds of other sources. Out of fear that the Germans were bound to invade the UK, large stashes of guns were hidden all over the place with no records kept of their locations for fear of the German's finding them. No one went and rounded them up later. After WW2 ended the US sold off many of the machines they'd used to make all manner of small arms, at auction, not enough questions asked, and they all sold. We're talking about people who don't have to go to a store to buy what they want, they don't have to buy it at all, they can just take it. How many conflicts have been fought around the world in the past 30-40 years?

Exactly. They're also not telling us how the guns were recovered. A stash of AR-15's with sequential serial numbers found in a drug raid is different than pulling a pistol here and there over the past 10 years from every petty criminal and honest citizen looking to defend themselves in a country that's gone to sh**.

Yes. Probably for the same reasons that the US military doesn't send it's cooks to the local grocery store to buy food. It's not cost effective, you get better prices buying in bulk, and more importantly, you get guns that are can't be traced. You think 18 wheelers full of guns just pull up in front of Bubba's gun shop in Arizona, then cruise on down to Mexico after filling out 20,000 background check forms? Or that some cartel employee goes through local classifieds to buy a few dozen dozen mis-matched used guns at a time to slowly trickle across the border?

They have billions of dollars, and people from their own government who control things like import/export unrelated to the US border in their pocket. Why make thousands of little transactions when they can make one massive transaction from a cooperating entity on the other side of the planet? If Walmart can get cheap toasters to the US from China by sending them in bulk, don't you think others can do the exact same thing with weapons?

I don't doubt that you read it, but it's false. Gold is too malleable and soft to make a functioning gun. It would blow up in your face on the 1st shot, assuming you could cycle the action the 1st time. Gold plating is an exotic fun thing for display guns, and can be done anywhere really.

The Zetas don't run around with long scissors and twine. They mutilate the bodies of people that they've shot to death, with guns and training obtained through the Mexican military and it's US advisors. Many of those guns probably come from the US, but likely from large scale exports of arms that civilians already cannot possess legally in the US, the kinds used by soldiers. The reason most of the killings down there don't involve high grade weapons is because most incidents are on a small scale, many are planned murders, not gunfights where both evenly matched sides exchange JHP's.

The US sells old missile technology to other countries. If those exact systems start turning up in Mexican cartel's hands, are we going to start pushing for laws that make it illegal for Best Buy to sell home computers to everyday Americans? That's what this is akin to in gun terms. Sure both are computers, both plug into some power source and churn out code, but they only appear the same to people who don't know the difference. If my analogy sucks it's because I'm not a computer guy and I don't really know the difference there either.

Placing more restrictions on channels that aren't used by the people doing most of the violence, based on incomplete data that's not being published, is a piss poor idea.