NEW YORK, Oct. 29, 2007
U.S. Guns Fuel Bloody Mexican Drug Wars
The Skinny: Rival Drug Cartels Battle It Out With Smuggled American Weapons
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A Mexican federal policeman stands guard as others lift bundles of drugs through a shaft that reaches down to a sophisticated clandestine tunnel which passes under the U.S.-Mexico border in 2006. (CBS)
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This photo made available Oct. 1, 2007, by African Mission in Sudan, shows seriously injured African Union (AMIS) soldiers being helped from Haskanita military camp, in Haskanita, Darfur, Sudan, to a waiting helicopter Sunday Sept. 30, 2007, to be evacuated for medical treatment. (AP Photo/AMIS)
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Interactive Guns In America State-by-state gun laws and death rates, maps of recent school and workplace shootings and facts on who's at risk.
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Photo Essay Darfur Protests Thousands of people join celebrities and lawmakers in urging a greater U.S. role in effort to end genocide in the troubled region.
The U.S. isn't the only country struggling with the effects of what's coming illegally over the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Washington Post reports that 100 percent of drug-related killings in Mexico are carried out with smuggled American weapons, according to Mexican police. About 2,000 enter Mexico each day, according to a Mexican government study.
The guns are "crucial tools in an astoundingly barbaric war between rival cartels that has cost 4,000 lives in the past 18 months and sent law enforcement agencies in Washington and Mexico City into crisis mode," the Post reports.
Officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms hope that some of the money will be used to give Mexican police chiefs greater access to U.S. databases for gun traces. Right now, the traces can only be made through federal police headquarters in Mexico City. That takes so long that many local cops don't bother.
They get into Mexico stuffed into the baggy pant legs or hidden in the trunks of "ants," or gunrunners -- often aided by corrupt customs officials. The weapons are often bought legally at gun shows in Arizona and other border states where loopholes allow criminals to stock up without background checks.
Guns are now flooding into the country in part because of the cartel war, and in part because of the ease of buying high-powered weapons since the U.S. assault weapons ban was not renewed in 2004, according to an ATF official.
The American taxpayer must now mop up the bloody results of the ban's demise: President Bush has promised $500 million in U.S. aid to help Mexico battle drug cartels, who are formidable precisely because of their steady supply of AK-47s and grenade launchers that were made In the U.S.A.
U.S. Has Talked Big On Darfur, But Has Done Very Little
There's been enough hot air emanating from the Bush administration over the crisis in Darfur in the past few years to warm the climate a few degrees.
But the Washington Post takes a long, hard look at those promises this morning, and find them coming up very short.
A year and a half after President Bush called for international troops on the ground to protect innocent Darfuris and repeatedly described the situation there as "genocide," the situation on the ground remains unchanged. More than 2 million displaced Darfuris have been unable to return to their homes. Despite a renewed United Nations push, the international peacekeepers have yet to materialize.
In spite of his passionate rhetoric, Bush has been ineffectual on two fronts: unable to mobilize either his bureaucracy or the international community.
Every time the president says he wants to take some direct action in Darfur, his aides block him, pointing out the folly of the U.S. being seen as invading another Muslim country. And then there's the elephant in the room: the U.S. has no strategic interests in Sudan.
"Advisers say Bush came to accept, albeit grudgingly, the arguments against using U.S. military assets - especially the possibility that they might attract al Qaeda," the paper reports.
But Bush's efforts to get other military assets onto the ground to help the strained African Union troops have gone nowhere, according to the paper.
"Overall," concluded John Bolten, the former U.N. ambassador to the United Nations. "Sudan is a case where there's a lot of international rhetoric and no stomach for real action."
Big Law Firms Turn Out To Be Embarrassingly Full Of White Men
Big law firms are getting graded on diversity by a bunch of law students at Stanford, the New York Times reports, and many are failing.
Students are handing out "diversity report cards" ranking firms on how many female, minority and gay lawyers they have, and then asking elite schools to restrict recruiting by those at the bottom of their rankings.
In New York, a third of the big firms have no black partners, and an overlapping third no Hispanic ones. Half the firms in Boston have no black partners, and three quarters no Hispanic ones.
"This is 2007," said Michel Landis Daubner, a law professor at Stanford and the adviser for the project, called Building a Better Legal Profession. "If you can't find a single black or Hispanic partner, that's not an accident."
The students also found relatively few female partners in New York, ranging from 7 percent at Fulbright & Jaworski to 23 percent at Morrison & Foerster.
Those numbers are "a bit of canary in the coal mine," said Deborah Rhode, another Stanford law professor. "The absence of women as partners often says something about how firms deal with work-family issues."
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Best-selling author Mitch Albom on his first nonfiction work since "Tuesdays with Morrie."
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See all 56 CommentsAll responsible, freedom-loving American families should have one.
www.a-human-right.com/effective.html
The "WAR ON DRUGS" is a drug gang''s best friend.
How else can they have a monopoly on billions of dollars in black market profits?!?
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see which distributor they sent it to, then to which FFL dealer it was sent, and then look at the form that the buyer must fill out under penalty of law, with a valid ID card.
Sometimes you come up with the silliest things.
Posted by erasmus6 at 03:42 PM : Oct 29, 2007
So , is it true that you send all your *** offenders to somene elses country (Like Thailand)?
Posted by gkc99 at 07:48 PM : Oct 29, 2007
If you Google AK47 +made in USA This is what you find
"Results 1 - 30 of about 822,000 English pages for ak47 made in USA"
These firms are in America and they make AK-47s in America.
Horns Custom Rifles
Ewbank Manufacturing
AK-USA Manufacturing Inc.
Marshall Arms
Arsenal Inc
Vector Arms
Ohio Ordnance Works
Robinson Armament Co
Piece of History Firearms LLC
Global Trades / Armory USA
Ohio Rapid Fire
Krebs of Krebs Custom, Inc
Red Jacket Firearms
Firing Line
Vulcan Arms, Inc.
http://www.ak-47.us/USmade.php
"--Posted by erasmus6
That''s why you got so much dirty $hit up there--it never airs out.
Unfortunately, Yourassmus seems to have endless hours to explain to us why we''re such trash.
So what HAS your government taken a stand on since WW2?
Such as? Since the rifle was invented by a Russian, the U.S. military never used it. Most civilian AKs are made in China or the Eastern European block.
Kindly cite some U.S. firms that make AKs!
ASK US WHY
After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. policy of a war on drugs with over a trillion tax dollars and 37 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses, our confined population has quadrupled making building prisons the fastest growing industry in the United States. More than 2.2 million of our citizens are currently incarcerated and every year we arrest an additional 1.9 million more guaranteeing those prisons will be bursting at their seams. Every year we choose to continue this war will cost U.S. taxpayers another 69 billion dollars. Despite all the lives we have destroyed and all the money so ill spent, today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier to get than they were 35 years ago at the beginning of the war on drugs. Meanwhile, people continue dying in our streets while drug barons and terrorists continue to grow richer than ever before. We would suggest that this scenario must be the very definition of a failed public policy. This madness must cease!
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This story is just more government propaganda demonizing guns and ignoring the real cause of the problem(prohibition).
Posted by Badmofojim
You are so right--let''s return to the good old days of the wild west---saddle up and hand me my six shooters...
Also our media doesn''t advertise our weak spots and give out too much information, so the terrorists can use it to their advantage. Actually I don''t think we have as much of a problem with the terrorists trying to get us like the U.S. does.:)
"I''''m getting a bit sick and tired of you Candians coming to the US and using our health care facilities."
Well the only ones that come are the RICH SNOTS that think they are better than everybody else and can''t wait a couple of days. As for everybody else, no one in their right mind would go to the States. We have health care here. We would rather not die from your germ infested, filthy hospitals. Now as for the malls, you might not want to turn us away, you need all the money you can get. Your country is going bankrupt.
"One question there, why are you bothering to post on a US site?? No places to blog up there?"
Actually the only reason I post on the U.S. site is to find out what is going on in your country. With us being your neighbors I want to keep up with things there. Afterall if you get blown up by your enemies, we will likely go with you.
Another thing, in Canada we don''t like to air our dirty laundry to the whole world like the U.S. does.
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