United Liberty

Since the prohibition of drugs has apparently worked so well, Mexican President Calderon must be counting on a similar prohibition to seemingly obliterate the presence of weapons among Mexico’s narco-traffickers:

Washington (CNN) — Mexican President Felipe Calderon addressed two of America’s most contentious political issues during a speech to the U.S. Congress Thursday, asking for a return of the assault weapons ban and blasting Arizona’s controversial new immigration law as a “terrible” endorsement of racial profiling.

Such a ban would certainly make it less likely that rural gun collectors will have their own “modern sporting rifles” but the idea that a prohibition would end the bootleg sale (and even manufacturing, as that might fall down to bootleggers just as drugs have) of these weapons seems like it’s putting alot of unwarranted faith in the capacity of law enforcement.

I live in the southern Bay Area, where gun crime is not an unknown, but common sense and life experience has shown that these bans do not work. A smarter move for policymakers would be to look into some sort of “third way,” to coin a phrase of anti-communist European socialists, in which the government works in cooperation with sellers and manufacturers so that guns are less likely to end up circulating in urban environments.