As we all know, there’s a big damned mess on the U.S. border right now. The State of Texas is trying its hardest to keep people from unlawfully crossing the Rio Grande, but to do so, they’re fighting the federal government. In other places, including Arizona, record numbers of people are crossing or attempting to cross, and they’re mostly not being stopped by federal authorities. So, border states have been bussing and flying migrants to “sanctuary cities” to let them deal with the problem.
But, most people don’t know a lot about what’s happening on the other side to push all of these people to want to go north. A very simplistic version of the story is that they’re poor and just want to work. A slightly less simplistic version of the story is that the cartels have ruined Mexico. But, the truth is a little more complex, and it’s a problem largely fueled by gun control.
Mexico’s Crime Problem Is Fueled By Gun Control
To illustrate what’s really going on, we have to look at a little town called Colonia LeBaron. It’s a town inhabited by a non-mainstream sect of Mormonism, and Mormons have been living in northern Mexico since the 1800s. Facing increased cartel and sicario violence, the LeBarons got permission from the Mexican government to start a small town militia, and had a number of gun battles with the cartels and their hitmen. This helped keep the town relatively safe.
To avoid revenge killing for defending themselves, the group told some of my Mormon family members that they started having to utilize armed escorts for any vehicles leaving the town, or driving between LeBaron satellite towns in Chihuahua and Sonora. This kept the cartels from attacking their little convoys for years.
But, once they they thought they were safe and that the armed escorts would no longer be needed, the very first unarmed convoy of women and children was massacred. Nine were shot or burnt to death, with several surviving children having to walk hours to get help while siblings and cousins hid under brush near the ambush site.
This is just one of thousands of such attacks that happen every year in Mexico. But, the cartels are not the only thing Mexican citizens have to worry about these days. Because the military has been given so much power to fight the cartels, that power is now being used to abuse the citizens, who mostly cannot get permission to own a gun or carry it for defense. This has led to murders, torture and strange disappearances, among many other crimes committed by the increasingly uncontrolled military forces.
So, at the end of the day, not only are cartels preying on Mexican citizens, but so is the government. Caught between violence perpetrated by what has become basically two groups of criminal gangs, many people have no choice but to flee. You’ll find similar stories going further south into Central and South America. Government disarms the people, they fall prey to criminals and then the government grows more powerful when people demand safety.
But, people just end up being abused by both the criminals and the government, who often end up being the very same people.
The Mexican Government Wants To Blame The United States
We’ve seen over and over since cartel violence exploded 20 to 30 years ago that the Mexican government likes to blame the United States for their problems. There have been real firearms smuggling operations, but many of them were conducted by corrupt U.S. officials (remember Operation Fast and Furious?). Not only that, but Mexico also claims that most guns they submit to BATFE for tracing end up coming from the United States, but they don’t mention that they’re only sending guns they think came from the United States for tracing, meaning that they’re just good at identifying U.S. guns, while most are obviously not from here.
We Shouldn’t Trust Mexican Officials Any More Than Mexican Citizens Do
While we know they’re lying about American civilians being to blame, there’s a bigger conflict of interest that nobody wants to talk about: the fact that Mexican officials are criminals themselves.
U.S. gun control groups and anti-gun politicians want us to believe that Mexico’s elected representatives are trying to protect their people from cartel violence, but these same Mexican officials are frequently caught with their hand in the cartels’ pockets. They’re abusing the people themselves whenever they can get away with it, too.
So, it should be no surprise that they’d be demanding even more gun control. After all, if they’re taking cartel money, do you think they’d be honest and say that innocent Mexican civilians should be armed? Absolutely not! That would bring the whole party to a screeching halt.
Instead of trusting them to tell us what our policies should be on this side of the border (which would allow the cartels to move north and bring corruption, death and tyranny along), we should instead be demanding that Mexico clean up its own affairs before telling us what to do.
The U.S. Needs To Pressure Mexico To Do The Right Thing
Instead of trying to build ever-taller walls for the cartels and coyotes to cut through, tunnel under and fly over, we should instead be trying to arm good Mexican people so they can fight back and secure their freedoms instead of running to the United States to be safe. Then, we should extend that policy further south until the Americas are secure from tyranny and criminal gangs.
If the U.S. government can’t bring itself to pressure Mexico into ditching gun control, then the Mexican people need to do it anyway. While good weapons are expensive and difficult for law-abiding civilians to obtain commercially in Mexico, multiple designs for good semi-automatic weapons are readily available on the internet now.
Designs like the FGC-9 can be made entirely from unregulated parts, and ammunition can be made at home. I can’t provide those links and instructions here, but there’s nothing morally wrong with doing what it takes to protect one’s home and family from tyranny and violence.
Mexico could be a great place with unlimited potential if the people would clean house, and modern technology provides the means to do it.