Texas Is Arming Mexico's Gunmen | Hacker News Reader

Texas Is Arming Mexico's Gunmen

texasobserver.org

34 pointsivanleoncz31 comments

Somehow no mention of Operation Fast and Furious, where the US government forced US gun sellers to sell guns to straw purchasers with the explicit purpose to deliver those guns to Mexican cartels? US government then lied to the Congress about it and invoked "executive privilege" to hide the details of this operation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal

Critically, the GPS battery life was only a few days and the GPS weapon "tracker" signal was routinely lost especially in car trunks

Sounds like what a high schooler would do when trying to stalk someone. Or, alternatively, what a corrupt Attorney's office would do if they were working for Mexican Drug Cartels who needed weapons.

An then everyone pretends it is so much better than other governments.

Ha not sure who pretends this...

Common in HN threads about how three letter agencies follow the law like everyone else, only other countries track down their citizens, and other related stuff only naive folks can believe.

The author works for an NGO called Stop US Arms to Mexico which is lobbying for several policy changes in the US to "reduce US legal gun sales to Mexico to pre-Merida Initiative (2007) levels".

This is the first time I hear about them and I'm not an expert on US law, so I don't know how effective would their proposals be, but at least discussing possible improvements is better than the defeatism that unfortunately dominates in both countries nowadays.

https://stopusarmstomexico.org/advocacy-policy-solutions/

Makes sense, Texas has lax gun laws, plenty of gun stores and large border crossings where chances of random search are much lower.

However, Texas politics means gun laws in Texas are unlikely to change soon.

Makes sense, the border between Texas and Mexico is a river that can be waded in many places.

Sounds like total nonsense, I can walk into a California gun store and buy the same guns they're selling in Texas, not to mention it also borders Mexico [1]

Operation Fast and Furious, the operation that saw the US government arm the cartels, was based out of Arizona.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1207329132/a-federal-judge-ru...

In good faith, I'm going to assume you are just ignorant of California gun laws.

California requires Firearm Safety Certificate [1], Texas does not.

California requires 10 day waiting period [1], Texas does not.

California requires Safe Handling Demonstration to be done by purchasing store [1], Texas does not.

California does not allow certain handguns to be sold in California [1][2], Texas allows all handguns to be sold.

California has one handgun, one semiautomatic centerfire rifle per 30 days purchase restriction, [1] Texas does not.

California has ammo purchase checks [1], Texas does not.

California has assault weapon ban, [3], Texas does not.

[1] https://www.oag.ca.gov/ogvp/overview-firearm-law [2] https://oag.ca.gov/firearms/certified-handguns/search [3] https://oag.ca.gov/ogvp/fed-assault-weapons-ban

Now we can talk about Fast and Furious and how dumb it was (So dumb) but acting like Texas and California are same when it comes to gun laws is just wrong.

Arm foreign crime syndicates and then scare your citizens about the dangerous foreigners. Solid strategy.

Say whatever else you will, but at least they read 1984 and watched V for Vendetta.

I don’t spend too much time thinking about guns so this is going to sound pretty ignorant, but reading this article is the first time I realized the terrible feedback loop at play here: the more guns sold the more crimes committed with guns the more people justify wanting/having guns to protect themselves from crime. Duh, says anyone who reads that.

But, with recent US Supreme Court decisions further expanding gun rights, is there any actual hope of stemming gun violence or is that even more of a pipe dream than it has been for the past x decades?

Loaded (ahem) topic, I realize, but genuinely curious. Doesn’t seem like there’s any way to put the genie back in the bottle especially when SCOTUS seems to want to keep rubbing the bottle.

If nearly everyone suddenly became selfless saints who never defend themselves, because they know that evil cannot extinguish evil, then the few remaining predators, who enjoy invoking fear in others, would turn this selfless society into hell. It seems to me this paradox cannot be resolved other than by separating the good part of humanity from the evil one, which isn't possible while there's a sizeable grey area in between - the undecided ones.

Or the police could do that but somehow they can't seem to.

Police serves a different purpose: it protects the society order as a whole, it's a defense against anarchy. For personal security you'd need to hire someone with authority to kill, a member of the police basically, but that's not an option unless you're rich. In the US not only rich are allowed to have personal security.

Progressives would tell you that gun violence is mostly caused by poverty, the drug war, and various institutional failures (e.g. El Salvador before the gang crackdown) and thus if you reduce these problems you'll also reduce violence.

Not sure whether to feel good or bad about your list because of how intractable those things seem to be, but at this point limiting access to guns is probably even more unlikely so it seems like the focus needs to be on those root causes and not on the guns.

There are many countries with high levels of gun ownership but dar far lower violent crime rates. The unifying attribute of those is that they lack poverty and desperation on the scale that were so masterful at creating in America.

If you take away guns from people who are honest and honorable and just want to protect their own by setting stones in legal avenues to acquire them, you create an environment in which only the criminals have guns.

If you uniformly and simply regulate gun ownership across an entire country so that any of the honest and honorable who want a gun can have one (or more) then you create an environment in which it's far easier to focus on criminals with guns and easier to seperate them from guns.

This is likely impossible in the modern USofA given the requirement for uniform simple regulation across the entire country and the massive historic backlog.

It worked well in Australia; three decades after breaking the world record for deaths at the hand of a crazed lone gunman, in Australia there's been fewer mass shooting than fingers on one hand, and I can go and shoot ULR with my neighbour here in WA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7owwTz7Z0OE

NB: Guns weren't banned in Australalia (no matter what the US NRA claims), regulations were made uniform - two low population states with little to no regulation came in line with existing states, and the territories also.

This made all guns licenced with an annual fee, a central registry, all sales and purchases recorded, no "straw sales", background checks mandatory, etc.

I was asking, given that it’s unlikely that guns are going to be further controlled, what hope is there for stemming gun violence. Maybe you’re saying gun violence goes down the more the honorable are armed? It’s a genuine question. Not sure you were attempting to answer that particular question.

Like I said, loaded topic. Trying to avoid charged language so please take my words as sincere.

Yeah, pretty much exactly that. An armed individual who wants to do harm with that firearm would be a lot less likely to act on it if he knows there are 10 armed good samaritans around him.

If you're in the opinion you're the only person likely to have a weapon on yourself, the stakes and balance change entirely.

He is also incentivized to use it before the 10 good samaritans do. And police is incentivized to use it before he does. Also, police cannot arrest someone because he carries a fully loaded machinegun.

I'm not against guns, i think the open carry of the BPP did way more for human rights than MLK and the civil right movement, but the fact that you can carry loaded war weapons and not be arrested for it in some states is fascinating to me.

I have heard (hearsay, mind you, I don't have solid fact or figures) that having a gun for protection tends to cause more problems than it solves. Not sure if it's an actually quantifiable position, but I am sure it won't sway anyone who's firmly on one side of the argument.

It's the pipe dream one. The composition of the Supreme Court is fixed for the next many decades. They will strike down more and more gun restrictions.

There might be hope of stemming some gun violence by, for example, having smarter approaches to drugs. Much gun violence is gang activity.

But things like school shootings will probably only expand. Nobody has any idea what the true root cause is, so they can't fix it. At best you can hope that metal detectors and lockdown drills limit the body count.

It is drug money that is used to purchase the guns which are then smuggled into Mexico.

Switzerland has a gun ownership culture but do not appear to have the same level of gun violence. Because they are not awash in illegal drugs? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_Switz...

But switzerland have strong laws about what you're allowed to do with your gun, how you have to transport it (hint: not loaded) and how you can store it (which is especially important if you have young kids).

Also, "Because they are not awash in illegal drugs", talking about Switzerland is rich. Switzerland, if you count drugs like cocaine and amphetamins is probably consuming at least as much drug per capita than a large part of the west (I had a classmate who "fixed" between brothels and nightclubs in Switzerland, i have stories). Also, they used to had huge drug death issues before they changed their law enforcement in like the late 80s/early 90s. I know here we talk a lot about Portugal and how Portland mimick them and it doesn't work. and how it seems to have stoped working in Portugal (funding stopped so result did), but the original country that implemented the "harm reduction/treatment/prevention before law enforcement" is Switzerland, with amazing success until recently.

The dataset is pretty interesting, although scary. I'll end up creating a notebook then using some pandas over it. Something to study, indeed.

Yikes, Mexico should build a wall and make Texas pay for it

It's funny but, it kind of makes sense...

For sure, gun control is something much needed on the US, for the sake of both nations, for the sake of Central America too.

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