Pubdate: Wed, 15 Apr 2009
Source: Durham Independent (NC)
Copyright: 2009, Durham Independent
Contact:  http://indyweek.com/durham/current/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2329
Author: Hal Crowther
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/MEXICO

MEXICO'S DRUGS COME NORTH AMERICA'S GUNS GO SOUTH

The Real Border Crisis

It's springtime in America, with birds and flowers, when soft breezes
blow and mass killers come out of hibernation. This week it was
Binghamton, N.Y., not far from where I lived once, where my parents
used to teach.

On the strength of 98 pistol rounds and 13 deaths, Binghamton stole
the media spotlight from Carthage, N.C., where earlier in the week
another deranged gunman murdered seven senior citizens and a nurse.

Carthage is just down the road from the hotel where my wife and I
celebrated our first anniversary. By now nearly everyone must have a
personal connection to one of these massacre sites: This was America's
fifth mass shooting in less than a month, with 38 victims dead and
more gravely wounded.

If we stick a pin in the map everywhere an armed lunatic has committed
multiple murders, the map of America would have a distinctly porcupine
appearance. For gross irony and nausea, I thought it would be hard to
upstage the North Carolina gunman who opened fire in a nursing home
and killed a group of helpless people whose ages ranged up to 98 years.

But in some ways the Binghamton slaughter was even more
grotesque.

The killer blasted his way into an immigration services center and
murdered resident aliens and refugees who were studying to become
American citizens.

For the survivors, it was a lesson in American citizenship they will
never forget.

Send me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe
free-but for god's sake tell them to keep their heads down.

And avoid public places.

The current crop of psychotic gunmen seems to seek what the military
would call "target-rich" environments, where large groups of potential
victims are preoccupied and stationary. Primary sites are classrooms,
offices and workplaces. Theaters have a lot of potential, and the
nursing home was a logical innovation. Churches are a particularly
vulnerable environment, dramatized in Maryville, Ill., last month when
a gunman strolled down the center aisle of the First Baptist Church
and assassinated the Rev. Fred Winters while he was delivering his
Sunday sermon. A chilling detail was that Rev. Winters deflected the
first of four rounds with his Bible, which disintegrated into confetti
as his killer kept firing. So much for divine intervention. No force
on earth or in heaven can protect us from America's staggering private
arsenal-now conservatively estimated at 290 million firearms,
virtually one for every man, woman and child-and the mentally unstable
Americans who seem to own a disproportionate share of it. Certainly
not the police, who are losing a desperate battle to protect themselves.

The day after the Binghamton massacre, three officers were murdered in
Pittsburgh, ambushed by a white supremacist with an AK-47 assault
rifle. This maniac, who also owned a .357 Magnum and other
high-caliber pistols, was said to be enraged because he thought
President Obama was scheming to confiscate his guns. (This rumor has
triggered an unprecedented boom in the pistol market.) The week before
in Oakland four policemen were killed when a routine traffic stop set
off a trigger-happy parole violator.

Cops know they sign on for a dangerous life, but it's not supposed to
be like Afghanistan. In a Palm Sunday service at St. Matthew's
Episcopal Church, a lay reader prayed for the families of the victims
in Carthage, as indicated in our programs, and ad-libbed an extra
prayer for the survivors in Binghamton. If she had read the morning
paper, she could have added the policemen's widows in Pittsburgh. Not
even our prayers can keep up with the carnage.

I feel that I've written these paragraphs, or ones much like them,
many times before ... Columbine, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois ...
the cities and the details fade but not the helpless unreality of
living in a ballistic republic. Forged in "the rockets' red glare, the
bombs bursting in air," the United States is dissolving in a hail of
bullets, bullets of our own manufacture and discharge.

There is nothing like it anywhere. It might be hard to prove that
Americans are crazier than everyone else, that homicidal violence is
programmed into our DNA or absorbed with our mothers' milk. Strictly
speaking, some of the most efficient mass murderers have not been
American, at least not native-born. The killer in Binghamton was a
naturalized Vietnamese immigrant; the Virginia Tech gunman was a
Korean exchange student.

In my wife's hometown of Grundy, Va., it was an African graduate
student who opened fire in the Appalachian School of Law and murdered
the dean, among others.

Unstable people looking for a better education and a better life come
to America, where they're often disappointed. But here in the somewhat
faded Land of Opportunity there's one equal opportunity they're never
denied-the opportunity to acquire lethal firearms and to use them.

It's not our people who are hopelessly insane.

It's our laws. While they were carrying out the corpses in Binghamton,
I turned confidently to Fox News for the best writhing and
rationalizing. "What can we do?" asked one reporter, with a properly
tortured expression. He didn't try to answer-this is called
hand-wringing with one hand-because the only obvious, sane answer is
"Try to pry some of this terrifying firepower out of the hands of
private citizens." And this answer is not politically permissible, on
Fox News or in Binghamton, where a local official said, "There's not
much we can do if a crazy person decides to start shooting." There's
not much anyone can do as long as the National Rifle Association
maintains an impassable road block between America and its brain, its
common sense and its self-respect. The gun lobby's basic mission is to
guarantee that every American, not excluding the desperate and the
deranged, can purchase all the firepower his feverish heart desires.

In principle they'd prefer to disarm psychotics, but how, they ask,
could we identify the mad-among the healthy population of patriotic,
law-abiding marksmen-when most of them have no criminal records and no
previous history of violence?

Of course this question decisively undermines every argument against
gun control.

Mental illness is a constant; lethal weapons are ostensibly a
variable.

But the NRA doesn't appear to grasp that, or grasps it and doesn't
care. Though they've never won an argument (or ever presented one that
would sway an 11-year-old), the NRA rarely loses an election or a
legislative battle where gun control is the issue. America's firearms
policies, dominated by an uncompromising gun cult, amount first of all
to a bloody war on logic.

Does the NRA have a solution for the escalating body count from
lunatics with guns? Yes, it does: a solution that even Americans from
sparsely armed blue states regard with slack-jawed disbelief. Share it
with a foreigner and he'll assume you're raving mad, hallucinating.
Negative publicity from America's round-robin of domestic massacres
never softens the NRA's stand against gun control.

Instead, they recommend arming all potential victims-putting handguns
in every student's backpack, concealing them under the Rev. Winters'
surplice and under the bathrobes, shawls and lap blankets of
octogenarians watching television. A pistol under every secretary's
keyboard and under every teacher's desk. They advocate arming patrons
in bars and restaurants as well, so no one will be caught without a
fighting chance when that gunman kicks in the door. Since the Virginia
Tech bloodbath, the astonishing proposal to arm college campuses has
been backed by legislative initiatives in 18 states, most recently in
Texas, where NRA flunkies are asking students, "Do you want to be a
sitting duck?"

In Austin, a relevant response came from John Woods, now a graduate
student at the University of Texas. Two years ago tomorrow (April 16,
2007), when he was an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, his girlfriend
was one of 32 people shot to death by Seung-Hui Cho, still the most
lethal lone gunman in American history.

He thought of buying a gun, Woods said, "Then I learned pretty fast
that wouldn't solve anything.

The idea that somebody could stop a school shooting with a gun is
impossible. It's reactive, not preventative," he was quoted by the
Associated Press as saying. Tell it to the NRA. Besides the
armed-campus bills, its immediate response to Virginia Tech included
the defeat of legislation, initiated by Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, to
rein in unlicensed gun dealers and prohibit concealed weapons in bars.
In Congress, the gun lobby maneuvered to eliminate handgun
restrictions and an assault-rifle ban in the District of Columbia, one
of the most dangerous cities in the USA. (Is it wrong to wish that
these congressional hypocrites could come face-to-barrel with the
results of their cowardice?) In North Carolina, while those senior
citizens were still laid out in the Carthage funeral parlors,
gun-loving legislators were pushing a bill to eliminate the licensing
of handguns.

Insanity is involved, but also cynicism, since the NRA is funded by
arms merchants and manufacturers who make their profits from the same
paranoia they encourage-and unfortunately justify. Money and fear are
an irresistible All-American combination; once reason has fled the
field, there's no limit to the craziness we may encounter. "Let's just
make carrying a concealed weapon mandatory for all law-abiding
citizens," a man proposes in a letter to the local newspaper, leaving
me trying to decide whether he's a satirist or someone who should be
locked in a cage. Gun freaks don't shy from open threats of armed
violence. "If only 3 percent of gun owners actively resist new
anti-Constitutional gun laws," one snarls in this morning's paper,
"the result will be violence on a scale never seen."

If the outgunned police are increasingly helpless to halt the carnage,
the government has been worse than useless.

If your legislator isn't supporting some restriction on firearms that
the NRA opposes-and it opposes everything, not only bans on assault
rifles but on armor-piercing (known as "cop-killer") bullets-then you
don't have a legislator, just another broken-down gun whore, another
pistol-whipped, brainwashed eunuch armed America has purchased out of
petty cash.

Even though saner gun laws are favored by two-thirds of the
electorate, profiles in NRA-busting courage are pitifully rare among
elected officials. The cop-killing psycho in Pittsburgh need not, it
seems, have feared the Obama administration or the Democratic
Congress. Attorney General Eric Holder and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
are both backing away from a fight to reinstate the federal
assault-rifle ban that Republicans allowed to expire in 2004: "We need
to enforce the laws we have right now," says Pelosi, parroting
gun-lobby rhetoric. "Basically," said Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of
Illinois (with obvious regret but no fierce indignation), "we reached
a point where there are not many people who will stick their political
necks out to vote for sensible gun control ... too big a hassle." The
NRA's smile is not fading.

Apparently we've replaced a government committed to giving them
everything with a government too frightened not to give them plenty.

The NRA is America's inoperable tumor.

Inoperable in part, I admit, because guns are flesh of our flesh, a
piece of our heritage.

The history of America coincides with the history of modern
firearms.

It's never been hard for the gun lords to convince millions of rural
conservatives that a government capable of seizing coke dealers' Uzis
would come after their deer rifles next. Or to seduce them with the
equally implausible Second Amendment argument that Jefferson and
Madison wanted us all to own guns, it says so in the
Constitution-though by the same logic Tom and Jim wanted us to own
slaves, virtually own women and regard a colored person as
three-fifths of a human being.

The Constitution remains relevant because it's a living, evolving
document (note the word "Amendment"), not a dead, embalmed one
impervious to history.

But the psychopathology of guns, too exotic to explore here, renders
victims gullible and insight-resistant to an extent I cannot explain.

But now the cancer that thrives in that inoperable tumor has spread
beyond our borders.

For years the American media machine has been shaking its head over
the terrifying violence in Northern Mexico, especially in the border
cities of Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana, where drug cartels rule almost
unchallenged, shoot policemen and journalists like jackrabbits, and
maintain the highest per capita murder rate in the hemisphere. In the
past 16 months, more than 7,000 murders have been attributed to drug
violence, 1,000 in the first eight weeks of 2009 alone.

Torture and decapitation is common; the narcos, as drug traffickers
are known in Mexico, produce cadavers at such a dreadful rate that
coffin-makers have fallen months behind the demand, and one morgue was
forced to store 200 corpses in refrigerators built for 80. This
drug-deranged dystopia, this republic of mere anarchy is centered in
districts visible from the city limits of El Paso and San Diego, and
its violence frequently spills over the border. America held its nose
and tried to seal its borders.

Then a few weeks ago it was acknowledged-it must have long been
known-that 95 percent of the guns employed in the Mexican murders were
purchased in the United States. Ninety percent of all firearms owned
by the drug cartels-assault rifles are their efficient weapon of
choice-were sold by American dealers, often through "straw buyers" to
conceal the transactions. Another statistic is even more stunning:
Every day of the week, 2,000 of these weapons are smuggled into Mexico
from the United States.

Though it boasts some of the most bloodthirsty capitalists on the
planet, millionaires and billionaires who make Bernie Madoff look like
Mister Rogers, Mexico turns out to have sane gun laws. South of the
Border, a gun is hard to get. Or would be, if it weren't for the crazy
Americans. Yes, our dealers arm all the butchers, torturers and
beheaders of Ciudad Juarez. When Mexico sends armed forces to the
border to try to stop the bloodshed, its soldiers come under fire from
American rifles. "The bloody result," wrote columnist Tom Teepen, "is
just one more of the prices we pay to appease our domestic gun lobbies
and their political intimidation." Where's the shame?

The NRA, never embarrassed, probably blames Mexico's ruin on
limp-wristed liberals or tequila.

But President Obama was embarrassed enough to send Hillary Clinton to
Mexico City to reassure the Mexican government that we accepted
"shared responsibility" and were ready to cooperate toward some solution.

It was not at all clear, however, that the administration was
embarrassed enough to prosecute the dealers in question or to live up
to its promise to ban assault rifles.

The first legal development in the gun-smuggling scandal was
unpromising but predictable. A Superior Court judge in Arizona
infuriated the state's attorney general by dismissing all charges
against George Iknadosian, a gun dealer charged with using straw
buyers to funnel at least 700 sniper rifles and assault weapons to the
Beltran Leyva drug cartel in Mexico. Federal agents had spent two
years building up the case against Iknadosian.

As well as turning schools and nursing homes into combat zones with
lockdown drills, America's failure to stand up to its gun bullies has
now destabilized a foreign nation.

Maybe we're just too stoned to care. The hulking irony that stalked
Hillary Clinton on her mission in Mexico City was that every aspect of
Mexico's tragedy is American-made. As Clinton acknowledged, the huge
fortunes that the drug cartels defend with their assault rifles and
private armies of assassins were all built on the insatiable drug
habits of the American people.

Ninety percent of all the cocaine Americans absorb in a year, an
estimate of 350 tons, is purchased from Mexican cartels.

Their marijuana enterprise is so vast it's hard to calculate: So far,
cartel growing operations have been discovered on at least 700 sites
in America's national parks and forests. Chemicals these growers
employ have polluted huge stretches of once-pristine American
forestland. Last year, agents uprooted five million of their plants in
California, and a half million in Kentucky. Eighty bales of the
finished product were recently seized in Asheboro, N.C. The cartels'
tentacles have long since extended to my home state.

Charlotte, where seizures of Mexican "black tar" heroin are up 233
percent since 2005, is known to be one of 230 American cities where
the narcos maintain distribution centers for heroin, marijuana and
cocaine.

One year of good business in America is worth approximately $25
billion to the Mexican cartels.

It's a creepy symbiosis between violent neighbors; the guns go south
and the drugs come north, and this criminal version of NAFTA keeps the
coroners busy on both sides of the border.

The link between the drug cartels and our gun cartel is a revelation;
even a comparison is worth weighing.

They both use fear and deep pockets to expand businesses that prey on
human weakness and irrational behavior.

They're equally unscrupulous and relentless and seem to scare
everyone, even the presidents of the United States and Mexico. Each
exerts influence way out of proportion to its numbers or its merit in
the great scheme of things, which in each case is nonexistent. Each
disrupts and dishonors the social contract and creates thousands of
unnecessary deaths, thousands of widows and orphans.

When it comes to recruiting politicians, there's a wide moral gap
between the narco who threatens-not idly-to kill you and your children
and the NRA hitman who only swears to crush you in the next election.

But the Arizona gun dealer who knowingly sells military weapons to the
world's most murderous drug gangs is a greater menace to society, and
a better candidate for eternal damnation, than the coke dealer who
merely exploits a mean addiction. If the shoe fits, or the
huarache.... Of course this moral balance sheet doesn't apply to every
rank-and-file gun owner, however gullible-but Satan is waiting with
open arms for those bastards who lobby Congress for their
constitutional right to sell AK-47s and cop-killer bullets to the
furious and the mad. "Inside Washington's bubble," complains The New
York Times in its lead editorial, "it's as if the shootings in
Binghamton and elsewhere never took place.

The NRA's ability to intimidate grown men and women remains
undiminished."

Meanwhile the body bags keep filling.

Optimists believe there's a point where ordinary people, the abused
and the terrified, will rise up and say "Enough is enough." I'm not an
optimist, and I keep an eye on Mexico. I've just finished reading
2666, by the late, celebrated Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano. Section
Four, "The Part About the Crimes," is a 300-page chronicle-corpse by
corpse, autopsy by autopsy-of the rape, mutilation and murder of some
400 women whose bodies have been dumped in the desert near Ciudad
Juarez since 1993. (One theory is that the narcos have a sideline in
pornographic "snuff" movies featuring real torture and death.)
Bolano's graphic version is nearly documentary, and I don't recommend
it. It will steal your sleep.

Clearly the author's strategy is to hammer his readers with horror
until they're desensitized and nearly dehumanized, to make a point
about the effects of these crimes on the Mexican policemen and
journalists who actually witnessed them. When the unspeakable becomes
routine it becomes almost acceptable, and then it's too late.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin