Posts Tagged ‘narco terrorism’

90% Myth: Where Are All Those Guns Coming From?

August 8, 2009

Where Are All Those Guns Coming From?

by Larry Pratt

The government of Colombia has been fighting the Marxist-oriented drug traffickers known by their Spanish acronym FARC for decades.  They have been trying to trace guns and other weapons coming from some twenty-seven different countries.

The guns turned up in various FARC encampments that have been busted by an increasingly successful counterattack by the Colombian military.

In an August 2 article in the Panamanian newspaper, Panamá América, it was reported that Columbia has made numerous inquiries to Interpol to find out where all the weapons are coming from.

In view of the Obama administration’s claims that privately owned guns in our country are migrating into Mexico and fueling violence down there, one might think that American gun owners are the cause of all foreign violence.  However, the truth is quite the opposite, it turns out.

The article summarizes the Colombian queries to Interpol as follows: rifles from Russia, Bulgaria, Communist China and Korea; pistols and revolvers from Central Europe and Brazil; explosives from Ecuador; munitions (a term that includes machine guns and other weapons such as grenades, mortars, cannons, rockets, etc.) from Brazil, Russia and Venezuela and anti-tank rockets from Russia, Rumania, Communist China, Sweden and the U.S.

Did you just hear the dog that did not bark?  In the above list, did you see any weapons that could be obtained at a U.S. gun store or show?  The only mention of the U.S. in the list is as a supplier of anti-tank rockets.  If anybody can tell me where us average citizens can buy rockets at a store or show, please let me know right away.

Where would anti-tank rockets enter the world market?  How about theft from domestic or foreign military arsenals?  By the way, the article reports that some of the weaponry mentioned above has been traced to Colombia’s own military industry.

The article also pointed out that the FARC are known to fly guns into Colombia on return flights that take drugs out.

You don’t suppose those same planes could sneak into Mexico, too, do you?

SOURCE

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Posted in Editorial, Opinion, Education, Gun Control, Law, Men's Issues, News, Politics, Warfare, Wordpress Political Blogs | 4 Comments »

What Is the DEA Smoking?

December 22, 2008

The Drug Enforcement Administration is in an optimistic mood. A new DEA report insists that the antidrug campaigns Washington has undertaken with Colombia and Mexico in recent years have dramatically slowed the flow of cocaine into the United States. The DEA’s principal piece of evidence is that average street prices for the drug have soared over the past twenty-one months from $96.61 per gram to $182.73, which suggests “that we are placing significant stress on the drug delivery system.” There’s just one problem with the DEA’s proclamation of success. We’ve heard it all before. Many, many times before.

For example, in November 2005, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy asserted that a 19 percent increase in cocaine prices since February indicated a growing retail shortage, thus validating Washington’s multibillion dollar Plan Colombia, designed to stanch the torrent of drugs coming from the Andean region of South America. “These numbers confirm that the levels of interdiction, the levels of eradication, have reduced the availability of cocaine in the United States,” White House drug czar John P. Walters boasted. “The policy is working.”

And what was the sky-high street price of cocaine that justified such optimism? $170 per gram. Adjusted for inflation, that price was actually higher than the latest price spike to just under $183. Yet clearly that earlier alleged supply-side victory in the drug war was short lived. According to the DEA’s own statistics in the December 2008 report, cocaine prices had declined to a mere $96 per gram by January 2007.

The reality is that street prices for illegal drugs act like the famous observation about prices in the stock market: they will vary. Over the past fifteen years, the retail price of cocaine has moved in a range between roughly $90 and $200 per gram. The latest spike is nothing abnormal, just as the plunge in prices from November 2005 to January 2007 was not unusual. Indeed, if one examines price trends over a longer period, any cause for optimism evaporates. During the early 1980s cocaine sometimes sold for more than $500 per gram. Obviously, that did not herald a lasting victory in the drug war.

Moreover, if the DEA had issued its 2008 report just three months earlier, there would have been even less evidence of supposed progress. For the previous five quarters, the street price had hovered around $120. The agency is simply grasping at straws to “prove” that the nearly four-decades-old effort to shut off the supply of illegal drugs is finally working.

cont.

This article simply points out what I have been saying for years; If you are for the drug war, you are for making thugs into wealthy men.

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