Guns

Having lived in San Diego for over a decade, I have seen on several occasions the signs indicating how it is illegal to take guns across the border into Mexico. You see, it’s illegal for private citizens to own such weapons in Mexico. Gun control advocates reason that if you make the objects used in violent crimes illegal, then the violent crimes will stop. As we can clearly see from this Guardian Article, Mexico’s murder tally is at an all time high with 25,339 in 2017, or a rate of 18.7 per 100,000 people. That’s over three and a half times the US murder rate last year, a country that has seen a doubling in the number of guns in the hands of private citizens in the last half century.

While private gun ownership isn’t the only variable to consider when looking at violent crime rates, it’s obvious from the above numbers that banning guns by itself doesn’t reduce violent crimes. Mexico’s government has had an adversarial relationship with privately owned guns in the country for over a century, and during the same period that the US doubled its private firearms ownership, the government further restricted private firearms ownership in Mexico. While it’s not completely impossible to get a gun as a private citizen in Mexico, it’s effectively illegal for your average citizen. This policy has been a dismal failure at reducing violent crime, and if anything it seems to have only served to protect criminal gangs within their borders. It’s a lot easier for criminals to bully their neighbors, sometimes murdering them, when they’re armed and the average person is not.

My first proposition, which is to the Mexican people, is that you should arm yourselves. By whatever means necessary, you should exercise your right to defend yourself against the tyranny of both your government and the criminal drug gangs in your country. I don’t imagine that your average citizen would be able to bring down a drug cartel by simply possessing an AR15 rifle, but it would at least give them a fighting chance if they ever run afoul of cartel operations, and the gangsters would think twice before attacking innocent people if they knew they were potentially armed.

Drugs

Recreational drugs have been illegal in the United States for most of the 20th Century. Drug abuse has not been eliminated, the incarceration rate in the US has exploded, and the illicit drug trade has driven the business model for gangsters to monopolize their supply. The war on drugs is just simply not working to eliminate both the drug trade and recreational drug use and abuse.

My second proposition is to the people of the US (and the rest of the world for that matter): stop criminalizing people who haven’t victimized anyone and make drugs legal, period. Without the cost of law enforcement related to drug prohibition alone, the taxpayers will be saved hundreds of billions of dollars. Want to eliminate deficits while cutting taxes Republicans? This is how you do it.

Not only will this stop these useless expenditures that are continually stolen from the average citizen, it will stop taking otherwise productive members of society and incarcerating them. Millions of prisoners will be released and be allowed to once again be productive members of society, rather than the tax burden they are now.

Finally, this will bleed the cartels in Mexico dry. Without the illegal drug trade, funding for their criminal activities will all but disappear. You can’t wage a war on the private citizenry and other gangsters without ample funding.

Peace

So there you have it. Rather than using the initiation of force to stop people from using drugs and guns to do criminal things, just simply make them legal. A simple criminal code that makes it illegal to murder and violently victimize people and enforcing it is sufficient to prevent these types of crimes. We don’t assume that someone who gets behind the wheel of a car is hell bent on murder (arguably a more dangerous thing than guns and drugs combined), so we shouldn’t assume that just because someone has guns, recreational drugs, or both, means they’re hell bent on committing crimes. Most of the crime surrounding guns and drugs is simply because those things are illegal. The majority of the remaining crimes are an indirect consequence of the criminal enterprise that prohibition drives.

Let’s stop this lunacy of trying to prevent the people of the world from taking responsibility for their own behavior. Legalize guns in Mexico. Legalize all drugs in the US (and everywhere else for that matter). In my opinion, these two things will almost completely eliminate the drug related crime not only in Mexico, but in the US as well.

Image Source: Pixabay user BobCarner.