Federal agents hunt for guns, one house at a time

At the end of the article:

Some stories, they say, are hard to believe.

The lamest so far came from a police officer: He said he bought a few military-style rifles, left them in his car and — on the same night — forgot to lock a door. He couldn’t explain why he didn’t file a police report or why he visited Mexico the day after the alleged theft.

Minister rejects criticism on handgun licence reform

Proposed Irish legislation would ban new handgun licenses except for those needed for Olympic sports.

[Minister for Justice] Ahern said he was determined to stamp out a practice known as “practical shooting”. His department had monitored with concern “competitions in which people shoot their way through multi-stage target courses based on real life combat scenarios, such as a home invasion or a hostage rescue”.

He said: “This activity is one that seeks to glorify and normalise attitudes to high-powered handguns and promote their use and ownership,” he said. Mr Ahern said “practical shooting” was a “highly undesirable” recent development in Irish shooting sports.

And here is why “practical shooting” is not practical:

“It’s simply not in the public interest to tolerate the development of a subculture predicated on a shooting activity which by the liberal standards of the US is regarded as an extreme shooting activity.”

He said any cursory research on the internet showed that these activities were marketed as being at the “extreme end” of handgun ownership and were “anathema to the tradition of Irish sporting clubs”.

Ah. Cursory research on the internet shows that practical shooting is extreme. Might he be a bit selective when conducting research? Perhaps taking folks like the Brady bunch as the experts with the final word?

“Rural Ireland isn’t like rural America of the George Bush Republicans, with a chicken in every pot and a gun under every pillow. We have no such tendencies in this country,” he said.

Nope. No bias there.

How many handguns have been licensed under the current system? 1,800 in the past five years.

Hat tip to the reader who sent this in.

Burn armed robbers, says Guinea crime chief

Guinean citizens should burn any armed robbers they catch to avoid filling the country’s prisons, the military government’s anti-crime chief said Tuesday.

Lawlessness in the capital city Conakry has risen in recent months, with soldiers accused of being among the main culprits of robberies and rapes.

“I’m asking you to burn all armed bandits who are caught red-handed committing an armed robbery,” said Captain Moussa Tiegboro Camara, appointed by the military junta to oversee the fight against drugs and serious crime.

The hyped part of the story, of course, is the fact that a government official is telling citizens to not only take things into their own hands, he’s telling them to mete out punishment. Serious punishment.

But, lost in the wow! factor, is this bit that many will overlook:

with soldiers accused of being among the main culprits of robberies and rapes

So while some are going to laud this humorous and satisfying, if reckless, approach to crime control, what are normal citizens supposed to do against soldiers who are presumably well-armed? Even if a group of justice-minded citizens gangs up on a crime-committing solider, overpowers him, and burns him as directed, isn’t the rest of the guy’s squad going to show up and mete out some punishment of their own?

You cannot successfully defy the bad guys for long if they outgun you.

In 1909.

Steve at The Firearm Blog has some photos of golden guns confiscated from Mexican criminals.

These must be some of those American guns flowing over the border via the “gunshow loophole”.

On the Bloody Border:

Meanwhile, Americans like El Paso County sheriff Richard Wiles want the U.S. to renew the assault-weapons ban that George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress allowed to expire in 2004. If it doesn’t, they fear, the few Black Hawk helicopters that Washington ships to Mexico’s antidrug warriors won’t make up for the thousands of AK-47 rifles and even rocket-propelled grenades pouring into the hands of the gangs. “It’s a shame,” says Wiles, “that it’s taken so many killings in Juárez to make Washington consider that.”

RPGs? Where did they get those? At a gun show via the loophole?

You know what I’d like to know? I’d like to know how many of those 17% (not 90% like Obama keeps saying) of the seized guns that originated in the US arrived in Mexico legally after being sold to the Mexican government. I’ve seen practically no one ask this question, and no one answer it.

If automatic weapons, grenades, and RPGs are in the hands of Mexican gangsters AND they originated in the United States, a claim that nearly every Mexican and American official parrots every chance they get, my guess is that the majority of them belonged at one time to the Mexican government. They make much hay out of the fact that they can confirm the weapons came from the US, and if they can do that they can tell who it was originally sold to. If it was sold to the government, the serial numbers are on a list somewhere, relatively easy to check.

I’m sure President Obama and AG Holder will let us know the answer right away.

Regarding the “bloody border,” I’ve been thinking about that and might have a creative solution to the problem. In fact, it’s so elegant that I can’t believe no one has thought of it before.

Why not build a fence or something?

Is That an Anti-Aircraft Gun in Your Pocket?

On April 14, Mexican federal police proudly displayed firearms seized from a cache thought to belong to the Beltran Leyva drug cartel. One of the weapons labeled by Mexican authorities as an anti-aircraft gun was featured in a Daily Mail article, while the other, mounted behind a crude armored shield, was the subject of another series of images.

The problem with the narrative presented by the Mexican federal police is that while these guns are indeed capable of causing great destruction, these weren’t the weapons presented to the world’s media, which unfortunately lacks the editorial talent or experience to know it is being duped.

Or, as I increasingly suspect, is simply willing to play along.

UPDATE: I really do think we’re past the stage where media ignorance of the subject and tight lids on intel can explain the media’s storytelling.

Around the time of the invasion of Iraq, the media played up reports of chemical weapons discoveries by the military. Later, they fell all over themselves blaming the military and the Bush administration for “tricking” them into thinking that rusty old rockets and factories were the WMD motherlode, but I didn’t really see any of that at the time. At some point the MO became to basically ignore someone’s sensationalist claims about finding the big cache of anthrax or nerve gas or missiles that could carry nuclear warheads because everyone realized that the big find just wasn’t going to happen and had never been there in the first place. Everyone blamed Bush for the deception, which was at least partially correct.

When will the media reach that same point with US military guns in Mexico?