Michael Bloomberg and America’s guns
— Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions are his own —
New York’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is stepping in where President Barack Obama fears to tread — confronting America’s powerful gun lobby. In the country that holds a commanding global lead in civilian gun ownership, it promises to be a hard fight.
No matter how it goes, America’s position at the top of the list of gun-owning nations looks secure. Up to 280 million guns are estimated to be in private hands and the arsenal is growing year by year. On a guns-per-capita basis, the United States (90 guns per 100 residents) is way ahead of second-ranked Yemen (61 per 100), according to the authoritative Small Arms Survey issued by the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.
Obama has been a sore disappointment for advocates of tighter gun controls, and a boon to gun manufacturers and dealers. Predictions that his administration would swiftly work towards greater restrictions helped spark a huge run on firearms after his election. The National Rifle Association (NRA), the country’s biggest gun lobby, said its members reported widespread shortages of ammunition.
Supply and demand are back in balance and those who rushed to stock up need not have feared an Obama assault on gun ownership. The president has shown no eagerness for stepping into the political minefield of gun legislation. On the contrary. Obama rowed back in haste after his attorney general, Eric Holder, prompted alarm among gun lovers by saying he wanted to reinstate a ban on assault weapons that was allowed to lapse under the Bush administration.
There are no signs either that Obama intends to fulfil campaign pledges on other hot-button gun legislation issues such as closing the so-called gun show loophole that allows private citizen-to-citizen sales without background checks, or the Tiahrt amendment, which limits disclosing information on the sale of guns used in crimes.
Josh Sugarmann, head of the Washington-based Violence Policy Center, a group advocating tighter controls, describes Obama’s attitude so far as “deeply disheartening” and says the president broke campaign promises on gun legislation.
American guns and the war next door
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –
Last year, around 2,500 Mexicans died in the twin wars drug cartels are waging against each other and against the Mexican state, using weapons smuggled in from the United States. In the first 11 months of this year, the death toll was 5,367, according to the Mexican attorney general. Next year?
There is no end in sight. At least two of the lethal ingredients in the toxic brew that fuels Mexico’s ever-widening violence are unlikely to change: lax American gun laws and a Mexican border that barely controls north-south traffic. On many of the crossing points along the 2,000-mile frontier, travelers coming in from the United States, by car or on foot, are routinely waved through without even having to show identity papers.
Weak Mexican border controls rarely feature in official or academic reports on a problem that has prompted some experts and U.S. publications to wonder whether Mexico is a “failing state”. That’s the headline over a cover story on Mexico in the latest edition of the business magazine Forbes. Mexican officials reject the label.
But privately, they concede that Mexican authorities are doing a less-than-thorough job in searching and monitoring north-south traffic. They tend to point in the other direction, to the easy availability of guns in the United States, the armory of Mexico’s criminal mafias.
According to statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the agency charged with regulating the firearms industries, there are 9,161 licensed arms dealers in the four states bordering Mexico — California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Buyers from licensed establishments need to go through a background check and the serial numbers of their purchases can be traced.
No background checks and no paperwork is necessary for weapons traded between private citizens on the “secondary” market — gun shows, over the Internet, through classified advertisements. Around 40 percent of all gun sales in the United States, where private citizens own at least 200 million guns, are on the informal market, estimates the Violence Policy Center, a Washington-based group in favor of tougher gun controls.
Sure. Why not? Watching borders definitely better than finger pointing.
Let’s assume Mexico does as adequate a job watching the border as the US would do. . . what would happen? Drug Cartels quit the business for lack of fire power? If there were no high powered sophisticated guns there would be no cartels, right? Mobsters in America during the thirties had it so rough. No glocks, AK-47s or Barrett .50s. It’s a wonder the mafia survived in America.
Perhaps a combination of the analyses behind *The Case for Piracy* *America’s decades old failed drug war* and this column are in order. If we combined all three would we still be talking about the border?
As an Englishman, I am often amazed and saddened by the world view of the US which the opinions of its citizens promote.
First, to set my stall out, I love the US. Has been my chosen holiday destination for over 20 years, and, along with Tokyo, New York is my favourite city of any I have visited.
However, the US is an amazingly insular society. Perhaps because of its size and sociological diversity, and there is often so little understanding of what the world is like outside of those borders. Comments such as those on this thread, when looked at by the rest of the world, paint a picture of hillbillies and NIMBY’s, where prejudice is always preferred to logic, and change is unpatriotic. In fact, as anyone who spends any time with you and your countrymen will know, America is one of the most welcoming and accommodating societies in the world.
There is however a real division between the individual view of acceptance and tolerance which I have encountered in my travels over the years and a need to be seen to be bigoted and narrow minded, as is the theme of most of the entries in this thread. The closest I can equate it to is the darkest days of the soviet era, when conversations in private discussed openly the Governments failures, whilst at the same time those same people would in public pursue the party line with almost maniacal zeal.
The facts of the ratio of gun ownership to violent death in countries around the world are there to be seen. If American citizens believe that, despite the fact that they are more likely to be shot an any other citizen of a first world country, they are safer because of the weapons they stockpile, then that is fine, but I do wish that the moderate American, the sensible and thoughtful intellectual, could also have a voice in these discussions, without being shouted down as “Un-American” or “Unpatriotic”.