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Republished with permission from borderlandbeat.com:

Mexico City residents have swapped personal firearms for consumer products in a program political and social leaders have termed a success, according to Mexican news reports. In a wire dispatch from El Universal that appeared on the website of El Diario de Coahuila, the program called depistolizacion or depistolization has received almost 6,000 firearms and munitions including grenades. According to data supplied by Secretaria de Seguridad Publica (SSP)  Jesus Rodriguez Almeida, 5,641 firearms were turned in of which 3,987 were pistols, 356 were grenades, a bomb, one weapons magazine and 44,495 rounds of ammunition. The program begun five months ago is set to end this summer. According to the report . . .

cash and prizes totalling MX $8,030,500 (USD $624,202.73) were passed out. Non cash rewards given out included 16 laptop computers, 1,900 tablets, 251 bicycles and 183 appliances of undisclosed types.

The report quoted Rodriguez Almeida as saying the program was intended to disarm the civilian population in the city’s 16 municipalities.

The program had the help of the church and local Catholic parishes were used as collections centers for the firearms.  Among the leaders who helped push the program included Distrito Federal president Miguel Angel Mancera, Cardinal Norberto Rivera and Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu.

A second program will start soon, but its time was not specified in news accounts.

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39 COMMENTS

  1. Laptops and video games much better to protect yourself from the cartels with than guns. Is Biden the Presidente of Mexico?

  2. Anyone else see a theme between these Catholic entities tied into disarmament in Mexico and in the States as a interesting connection between today and the disarmament of the Colonies & the Nazis movement?

    This is why “Religion”, as a means to subvert indepentent thought, is a very disturbing trend throughout history…

    • I don’t see a connection.

      I do remember that at one time not that long ago (1926-1929), the Catholic Church took up arms to defend against the Mexican government that was trying to disarm them and kill them.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristero_War

      It’s very odd that certain Mexican Church leaders have not learned from history. Either that or they’ve been infiltrated by the enemy.

      What they’re doing IS NOT in accord with Catholic teaching. The men supporting this are either confused or corrupted themselves.

      • Likely they’re reading things as “thou shalt not kill.”
        Unfortunately they fail to connect the dots between the war to regain Israel that immediately followed that commandment being handed down by God, and the fact that the proper translation is closer to “thou shalt not commit murder.”
        And they apparently don’t read history books.

        • Absolutely correct on all counts! And to add weight to the argument, let me quote their boss:
          “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his estate, his possessions are secure.”
          -Jesus Christ- Luke 11:21

          There’s also another quote that comes to mind, though from a far, far less magnificent source:
          “Those who hammer their guns into plowshares will plow for those who do not.”
          -Thomas Jefferson-

        • In fairness, Catholic teaching on self-defense is actually fairly strong.

          cf. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13691a.htm

          Both the Roman Catechism and the Catechism of the Catholic Church are very explicit about the right to self-defense. And while not ideal the statement the Holy See has officially made about guns and their sale/commerce is fairly vague, but mentions the right to self defense (and in any case is what we Catholics call a non-magisterial document)

          That is something to bear in mind, many things are blathered in bureaucratic documents. For Catholics those do not have any “magisterial” authority, i.e. we don’t have to heed everything some committee or talking head says. And the actual teaching on self-defense, that has been held for centuries, is much broader and permission than the rhetoric of prelates who are far too much partisans these days.

          One longs for an Archbishop Hughes, who when a mob threatened to burn down some Churches (the US was raunchly anti-Catholic), met them with a bunch of armed laity and told them try it and see what happens.

          Or Benedict XV who, before he was pope, was known to carry a concealed pistol to scare way vagabonds and mobs.

      • Really? The primary religion of Britain was Catholicism from a time well before the colonies were established. The protestants left England to escape persecution. These persecutions was the control of arms as well as differences in worship.

        When the colonies were being established arms was a very large necessity in a rough new country. They needed arms primarily for hunting & later self defense from natives. Before the war of independence the Catholic entities asserted the Kings ideology on worship & we all know that the last straw was about the attempted control of shot & powder.

        In Pre-world war Germany the Church Chancellorship was in support of Hitlers regime. They even assisted with the subversive extradition of Nazi officers out of Europe to Africa & South America that were wanted for war crimes involving pow & concentration camps.

        • Every single assertion in your post is false, and laughably stupid.

          1. England was protestant. Henry the VIII broke from the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church was protestantized under Edward, there was a Catholic restoration briefly under Mary, and then protestantism (via media Anglicanism) under Elizabeth. After that, there was the English civil war where puritans took control, having deemed the protestant Anglican Church too Romanized still. They beheaded the king. Then the monarchy was restore. James II came out as a Catholic, and when he had a child was forced out of England and William of Orange and Queen Anne (protestants) replaced him (see the Glorious Revolution of 1688).

          At the time of the Revolution, it was still the law that being a Catholic priest in England meant being drawn and quartered, though the law was no longer enforced with such rigor. The persecuted groups that came to Americans were puritans (who wanted to purify the state Anglican Church), Quakers, and, yes, Catholics. Maryland was founded as a refuge for Catholics to escape religious persecution in England. Then protestants took over that colony and persecuted them there too. So, really you are an incredibly ignorant bigot at this point. Protestants persecuted other protestants, they fought what they deemed heresy (anabaptists, e.g.). American protestantism is the protestants of protestants and you need to understand that in reading back through history

          2. There is no such thing as a Church Chancellorship. And seeing as the Nazis persecuted the Church (not to the same extend, of course, as Jews), that the Catholic regions of Germany (Bavaria, e.g.) were the most anti-Nazi, seeing as Mit Brenner Sorge, written by Pacelli (later Ve. Pius XII) and issued by Pius XI condemned Nazism and fascism, and excommunicated Catholics who joined them, well you are full of crap.

    • Its not just Mexico. After Newtown many of the Churches in CT had and continue to have “hand in your guns” sermons.

      For my church, they get and empty envelop with each such sermon.

      The church is itself and big bureaucratic institution full of its own stupid. I wish they would stay out of politics.

      • I’m about to suggest a very rude thing, so please forgive me: change your church. They don’t deserve your tithes or your participation. If they’re asking for to get rid of your guns, it’s not your soul they’re interested in.

      • A thoroughly bigoted, inane and thoughtless statement. It speaks far more to your hatred of the church than your support of gun rights.

        • I don’t see how any of that is true. Guns are not evil, therefore the church has no ground to speak on them and tell people to turn them in. They want to talk about sex outside of marriage, or loving your neighbor, or any of a million other things that are biblical or at least morality-based, fine. They can even implore people not to use their guns for evil. But telling people to turn in their guns as if they are inherently a corrupting influence is outside their purview.

    • I don’t believe in any gods or goddess and have very good reasons as to why faith/religion/nonsense is very dangerous to believe. In this case people used every tactic available to fool people into disarmament.

      What we have in the mindset of people for civilian disarmament is a group who desperately want a class system. Where one person is better than another, and use plebeians are not worthy of any form of defense. Plus as corrupt as the mexican/us government are, I can see why they’d want weapon control. No burglar likes it when the home owner has an AR-15, much less an AA-12 shotgun.

  3. TO: All
    RE: Heh

    Sounds like the drug cartels are cashing in on the weapons they took off of their dead competitors.

    After all….the ‘law abiding’ citizens of Mexico are not allowed to own weapons. And those that do, i.e., non-cartel members, are obviously disarming themselves.

    Regards,

    Chuck(le)
    [Let the Mexicans that fled to US go back and straighten out their OWN country.]

    • It’s “legal” to own a firearm in Mexico (it’s in the Mexican constitution), although it must be a pistol (semi or revolver), you can only own one, only the smallest calibers are allowed and it must be for “home” protection only. You cannot take it out from your house (carry). The purchase process is a very bureaucratic task, and you can only buy what the SEDENA store (the only one in the whole country) has in stock at the moment of purchase.

      To carry (bear) a firearm, you need a special license only given by the SEDENA (Mexico’s army), and besides all the requirements they ask (psychological tests, drug tests and so on…) it’s up to their discretion to grant you the permission or not; in practice, this discretion means having good connections and paying a bribe from 2000 USD to 13000 USD.

      Of course if you only want to get a firearm, you go to your friendly local Mexican police officer and ask him to get you a gun… if you know what I mean…

  4. “The report quoted Rodriguez Almeida as saying the program was intended to disarm the civilian population in the city’s 16 municipalities.”
    Not even a pretense of disarming criminals.

    • Criminals are civilians, too. (Not that they’re likely to be disarming…)

      If they were telling the complete truth, they would have said that they were persuading all the credulous fools in Mexico City to disarm themselves.

      On the other hand, I’d bet most of those pistols were owned illegally, so using them would have been a crime in addition to possessing the banned item. Maybe criminals really DO turn in their guns. (But there are criminals, and then there are *criminals*…)

    • For 2000 rds of 9mm Luger I’ll give them a chance to win my spare freezer. If they win (which is probably a long shot), they can add the freezer to the list of prizes for the next go-round. Win-win.

        • I think so. My Spanish is a little rusty, but I seem to remember that using “de” as a suffix was the same as “de” as a standalone word: meaning “of”. If that holds, the name would be “Capaign of Pistolization”, which suggests something quite different than a buyback.

        • No, de- when attached to another word has the same meaning as in English. What you’re thinking of is when it’s a separate word, and that’s usually only as part of a name, e.g. Manuel de Rivera basically means Manuel of/from Rivera.

          I don’t think despistolización is actually a real word, but in this usage, it basically translates to disarming, so Campaña de despistolización means Disarmament Campaign.

  5. And yet mexico city is still a sh!thole. Well for some it still is.

    I’m sure with enough money you can make “your” section of any third world country quite nice. It must help them sleep at night knowing the peasants can’t rise up so easily.

    How easy it was when it was only swords and spears to be swung by the physically strong.

  6. 44,495 rounds of ammunition? Finally we know what DHS is doing with its stash. ATF enables the guns, DHS loads ’em up. That’s the kind of interagency collaboration that the Patriot Act is all about.

  7. the program called depistolizacion or depistolization has received almost 6,000 firearms and munitions including grenades.

    Grenades? Are we still pretending this hardware is coming from civilian gun stores in U.S. border states?

    • Well, DUH, it is still about that! I mean, COME ON. Wake up. There is no way anyone could get them illegally in mexico. They HAVE to be jumping the border, illegally stealing them from any one of the gun stores here since EVERYONE knows that every gun store HAS to have a cache of grenades on stock since virtually no one can buy them, and then jumping back over the fence to sell them there. DUH!!!!

      /sarcasm

  8. I wonder how many of the grenades are going to be blamed on lax us gun laws? Because everybody knows that the violent crime problem in mexico is because we have gun shows here in the U.S. and everybody knows how easy it is to get grenades. And nobody steals weapons or explosives from the mexican government. I wonder if when they run the serial numbers and find that less than 1% of those guns came from the states, and that 99% of those were stolen, will we ever hear about it? No, all we will get is some vague statement regarding a “large number of U.S. firearms seized in mexico.” No one will be able to provide specifics untill long after its relevent, and by then no one but us gun nuts will care to listen.

  9. Goddamnit! When will my fellow countrymen learn that this is all a ploy to keep us poor, unarmed and complacent!? And the church is in on it too. Goddamnit!

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