Say Anything Blog

Back in March and April the Obama administration was making a stink about border violence with Mexican drug lords.  And while that is a problem, Obama and his fellow liberals were suggesting that it was American guns being shipped to Mexico that was causing the problem.

And not, you know, the unquenchable American thirst for illegal drugs that the drug lords are servicing.

As it turned out, the gun figures used by the Obama administration were pretty much fabricated.  But that’s not stopping Obama’s buddies in the liberal media from now making the same claims about Mexican drug violence - that it’s caused by American guns - about Jamaican drug violence.

KINGSTON, Jamaica – Ships from Miami steam into Jamaica’s main harbor loaded with TV sets and blue jeans. But some of the most popular U.S. imports never appear on the manifests: handguns, rifles and bullets that stoke one of the world’s highest murder rates.

The volume is much less than the flow of U.S. guns into Mexico that end up in the hands of drug cartels — Jamaican authorities recover fewer than 1,000 firearms a year. But of those whose origin can be traced, 80 percent come from the U.S., Jamaican law enforcement officials have said in interviews with The Associated Press.

And as the Obama administration cracks down on smuggling into Mexico, Jamaicans fear even more firearms will reach the gangs whose turf wars plague the island of 2.8 million people.

“It’s going to push a lot of that trade back toward the Caribbean like it was back in the ‘80s,” said Vance Callender, an attache at the U.S. Embassy in Kingston for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Guns are not motivating drug crime in Mexico or Jamaica.  What’s motivating drug crime all over the world, including places like Mexico, Jamaica and our own communities right here in America is the prohibition on drugs.  If there were no black market for drugs there would be no drug wars.

As usual, the liberals blame guns for crimes that are really being motivated by something else.  The old anti-gun control maxim holds true: Guns don’t commit crimes.  People commit crimes.

But this really is something of a brilliant strategy by liberals who want to control guns.  They know that conservatives are pro-gun.  They also know that despite being pro-limited government in general, most conservatives are unwilling to even discuss the possibility of ending even parts of America’s drug prohibition.  And since ramped up enforcement efforts and increasingly draconian punishments haven’t even put a dent in drug use in this country, pitching gun control as a way to fight drugs works perfectly to get people who would normally oppose such initiatives on their side.

It’s a deft bit of triangulation.  Let’s hope it doesn’t work.