Calderon's shot at American guns

Over four minutes of his Thursday address to Congress was spent lecturing Americans to renew the federal Assault Weapons Ban that sunset in September 2004. His justifications for the ban were all garbage. Mr. Calderon claimed that guns covered by the federal ban were particularly "powerful weapons." While the term "assault weapons" may conjure up visions of military hardware, the inside guts of these feared guns are essentially the same as deer hunting rifles. The firing mechanisms in semiautomatics and machine guns are completely different. The entire firing mechanism of a semi-automatic gun has to be removed and replaced to turn it into a military weapon like an AK-47. Mr. Calderon's propaganda aside, Mexican drug gangs are getting real military weapons from within Mexico, countries south of his border and other places around the world. Reports indicate that grenades and rocket launchers in use in Mexico aren't even available for sale in the United States and come from places like South Korea, Israel and Spain. Between 2007 and 2009, 2,239 grenades were seized by the Mexican government, and those weren't from here. Markings similarly show that machine guns in Mexico largely originate from China, Israel and South Africa. "If you look carefully, you will notice that the violence in Mexico started to grow a couple of years before I took office in 2006," Mr. Calderon said. "This coincides, at least, with the lifting of the [U.S.] assault weapons ban in 2004." He also patronized Americans by warning that our own gun ownership endangers the United States. The problem with these talking points is that murder rates dropped in America and Mexico between the 2004 expiration of the ban and 2008, when the latest data is available...more