Hey, look, we can get gun grabbing and illegal immigration in one article, via the always nutty New Yorker
The Link Between America’s Lax Gun Laws and the Violence That Fuels Immigration
In the summer of 2009, a sixty-three-year-old professional bass fisherman from Florida named Hugh Crumpler III was arrested for international arms trafficking. For years, he’d been buying weapons, legally, at gun shows, and then reselling them to individuals from Latin America who wanted to smuggle the guns back to their home countries. Crumpler was what’s known as a “straw buyer.†“I developed a group of customers,†he said later, in an interview with Univision. “And it dawned on me one day that they were all Hondurans; and that they all seemed to want the same type of guns; and they all seemed to want more and more.†By the time he was caught, Crumpler had resold roughly a thousand guns, including Glocks and AR-15 assault rifles. He eventually agreed to coöperate with American authorities in exchange for a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, some of the guns Crumpler sold were used in crimes in Honduras, Puerto Rico, and Colombia, including in at least one homicide.
We have laws against this. Crumpler was eventually caught and prosecuted. If only criminals followed the law.
Interestingly, there’s zero mention of the Obama/Holder gun running program, Fast and Furious.
The ready availability of guns in America is often discussed as a domestic-policy matter. But it is an international issue, too. Every year, guns that were initially sold in the U.S. are used in thousands of crimes in Canada, Central America, and the Caribbean, according to the Center for American Progress. It’s estimated that some two hundred thousand American guns are smuggled across the southern border each year. The region that’s been hit the hardest is Central America, where gun laws are relatively strict yet homicide rates are among the highest on earth. Gang wars, massive state corruption, and murderous criminal syndicates are to blame for the violence, but American firepower facilitates it. “Unlike other forms of contraband, American weapons don’t just pass through Central America but engulf it in storms of violence,†Mark Ungar, a political-science professor at Brooklyn College and an expert in the region’s gun violence, told me. This violence, in turn, has fuelled a refugee crisis. Since 2014, more than a hundred and fifty thousand unaccompanied immigrant children from countries in the region have fled to the U.S. seeking some form of asylum.
Oh, well if the Center for American Progress says it, it must be true! Anyhow, the point here is to claim that all the people who come to the U.S. illegally, as well as show at the border and claim asylum, are the result of America’s gun laws, so, we should let them all in and ban all guns.
“The violence crosses from here, in the U.S., to Central America,†Hernández told me. “It’s the opposite of what the politicians say. Gangs and guns—those all go south.†He felt an affinity for the young organizers of this weekend’s March for Our Lives. “This demonstration is necessary. We young people are dying because of all this. And at the end of the day, it’s the people, and not the President, who have the power.†The March for our Lives organizers were making a case to acknowledge the policies that allow mass shootings to happen. Hernández believes the wider ramifications of those policies deserve attention, too. In Honduras, Hernández said, “it seems like the hitmen and gangsters have better weapons than the police.â€
Said march is a typical astroturfed gun grabber march, in which the NRA and gun manufacturers are being assailed, with no mention of the utter failure of government in enforcing the existing laws which could have stopped the Parkland nutjob.
