Take a look at the image after the jump. [Warning: graphic] Notice that the man on the left’s missing his right foot. Note the billboard in the background; the men were hung from a highway overpass in Monterrey, Nuevo León. Resist the urge to dismiss this carnage as collateral damage in the ongoing Mexican drug cartel turf wars. Instead, clock this from blogdelnarco.com: “At around six in the morning, motorists circulating about Gonzalitos Avenue observed a group of armed men. They hung two bodies at the same bridge where they hanged La Pelirroja . . .
There were approximately 20 witnesses including some policemen who did nothing, as if the armed group was invisible. Even some ministers observed the scene and passed by.
I’ve heard members of TTAG’s Armed Intelligentsia dismiss the violence in Mexico as a reflection of the culture of corruption that has bedeviled the country since it was formed. As if average Mexicans are getting the non-government they deserve. And the violence to match. I disagree. Profoundly.
I’m aware of the dangers of ethnocentrism. But I believe there are hard-working, God-fearing, moral Mexicans. Men and women who share the average Americans’ desire to live in country where they can live and raise their children without having to appease people without respect for honest labor, personal freedom and the sanctity of human life.
If you want to know how Mexico got to where it is today, why the United States is not there, and how we could be, consider the corollary to the oft-repeated quote from Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Good men can’t do anything about evil if they are denied the means to do it.
Wherever you find a disarmed population you find unimaginable brutality. The Holocaust is only the most common and perhaps obvious example. The horrors visited upon African-Americans—lynchings, torture, kidnapping, rape, starvation and endless humiliation—provide the same cautionary tale. Today’s Islamo-fascism rests on the bedrock of a defenseless public.
Truth be told, Mexico is plagued by torture, murder, extortion and corruption because those who would oppose it are powerless against the evil men who rule them. Make no mistake: the Mexican government forcibly disarmed the public. If nothing else, they shuttered all the country’s gun stores and transferred all gun and ammo sales to the Mexican military. Which now denies the public their constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
In that sense, you can no more blame the Mexicans for their suffering from drug cartel violence than you can blame the millions of Jews packed into freight trains and sent to concentration camps. Or the slaves who had their children ripped from their arms. Or the Arabs gunned down by their not-so-secret police.
That said, there’s an undeniable element of complicity from those who don’t understand or value their freedom enough to exercise their personal responsibility to protect and defend it. We the people don’t need guns. We’re “above that.” We pay the police and National Guard and FBI and DEA and ATF and DHS and all those other agencies to wield guns on our behalf.
Is it any coincidence that police corruption flares most violently in American cities where citizens have surrendered their constitutional right to self-defense? Providence, Boston, LA, Philadelphia, New York, Hartford. Anyone remember Mayor Richard Daley’s instruction to his police force re: protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention? “Break their heads.”
History tells us when oppressed people are armed they fight back against aggression, enslavement and corruption. Look at what the Jews did in the Warsaw ghetto with a few rifles and pistols. Consider the contribution of African Americans to the Union’s efforts during the Civil War. Americans who write-off Mexican citizens as complacent and complicit in their own misery deny our common humanity.
And willfully ignore the importance of armed self-defense. Without it, we are literally defenseless against those who would twist and ultimately destroy the rule of law for their own profit and power. I know: The UK. Europe. No guns. Plenty of peace. Freedom? Not so much. Rioting? Sure. What do you expect from a society where the balance of power has tilted violently to the side of the government? What do you see in their future?
America’s future is bright. Protected and informed by the Second Amendment, the so-called Tea Party movement is out there, somewhere, continuing to agitate for a return to individual liberty based on personal responsibility. As the Supreme Court recently affirmed by incorporating the Second Amendment, we are still a nation of gun owners and, thus, laws.
As such, we have no business supporting Mexican gun control. I am deeply shamed by Uncle Sam’s longstanding support for Mexico’s firearms prohibition. I am deeply offended by the feds’ reprehensible support to the Mexican government and its cartel paymasters. Which includes supplying the bad guys with “military” firearms.
At the very least, the United States should stop arming the wrong people. We should halt all arms sales to the Mexican military until they restore their citizens’ right to armed self-defense. And then we should do whatever we can to get guns to the people who need and deserve them.