Who’s arming the Mexican cartels?
1. U.S. Defense Department shipments to Latin America, known and tracked by the U.S. State Department as “foreign military sales.”
2. Weapons ordered by the Mexican government, tracked by the State Department as “direct commercial sales.”
3. Aging, but plentiful arsenals of military weapon stores in Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua.
And they rightly note that, despite what the press and the anti-gunners (but I repeat myself), you cannot go to a gun show and buy grenades and machine guns.
June 3rd, 2011 at 9:38 am
They forgot:
4. BATFE.
June 3rd, 2011 at 11:23 am
I’ve always said that the whole “bulk straw-buyer and smuggling from the US” scenario simply didn’t make sense. Why would they go through that effort and expense when the Mexican government and military are so riddled with corruption, and there are so many less effective governments to the south? Not to mention all the “freedom fighters” and no-longer-existent governments the US and the Russians weren’t supplying with weapons (*wink, wink*, *nudge, nudge*) during the Cold War. How many of those supposedly non-existent weapons are still floating around the third world unaccounted for?