DRUG CONTROL BEGETS GUN CONTROL

The Violence in Mexico Is Caused by Prohibition, Not
Firearms.

During his April visit to Mexico, President Barack Obama suggested
that Americans are partly to blame for the appalling violence
associated with the illegal drug trade there. "The demand for these
drugs in the United States is what's helping keep these cartels in
business," he said. "This war is being waged with guns purchased not
here but in the United States."

Obama is right that the U.S. is largely responsible for the carnage in
Mexico, which claimed more than 6,000 lives last year. But the problem
is neither the drugs Americans buy nor the guns they sell; it's the
war on drugs our government has drafted the rest of the world to
fight. Instead of acknowledging the failure of drug control, Obama is
using it as an excuse for an equally vain attempt at gun control.

"More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the
United States," Obama claimed, repeating a favorite factoid of
politicians who believe American gun rights endanger our southern
neighbor's security. The claim has been parroted by many news
organizations, including ABC, which used it in a 2008 story that
suggested the sort of policy changes the number is meant to encourage.
The story, which asked if "the Second Amendment [is] to blame" for
"arming Mexican drug gangs," quoted an agent with the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives who said, "It's virtually
impossible to buy a firearm in Mexico as a private citizen, so this
country is where they come."

But as Fox News and Factcheck.org have shown, the percentage cited by
the president greatly exaggerates the share of guns used by Mexican
criminals that were bought in the United States. Fox estimates it's
less than a fifth, while Factcheck.org says it may be more like a third.

If the guns used by Mexican drug traffickers do not mainly come from
gun dealers in the U.S., where do they come from? Many of the weapons
are stolen from the Mexican military and police, often by deserters;
some are smuggled over the border from Guatemala; others come from
China by way of Africa or Latin America. Russian gun traffickers do a
booming business in Mexico.

Given these alternatives, making it harder for Americans to buy guns
is not likely to stop Mexican gangsters from arming themselves. The
persistence of the drug traffickers' main business, which consists of
transporting and selling products that are entirely illegal on both
sides of the border, should give pause to those who think they can
block the flow of guns to the cartels.

The futile effort to stop Americans from consuming politically
incorrect intoxicants is the real source of the violence in Mexico,
since prohibition creates a market with artificially high prices and
hands it over to criminals. "Because of the enormous profit
potential," two senior federal law enforcement officials told the
Senate Judiciary Committee in March, "violence has always been
associated with the Mexican drug trade as criminal syndicates seek to
control this lucrative endeavor."

The more the government cracks down on the black market it created,
the more violence it fosters, since intensified enforcement provokes
confrontations with the police and encourages fighting between rival
gangs over market opportunities created by arrests or deaths. "If the
drug effort were failing," an unnamed "senior U.S. official" told The
Wall Street Journal in February, "there would be no violence."

Perhaps it is time to redefine failure. Three former Latin American
presidents, including Mexico's Ernesto Zedillo, recently noted that
"we are farther than ever from the announced goal of eradicating
drugs." The attempt to achieve that impossible dream, they observed,
has led to "a rise in organized crime," "the corruption of public
servants," "the criminalization of politics and the politicization of
crime," and "a growth in unacceptable levels of drug-related violence."

Instead of importing Mexico's prohibitionist approach to guns, we
should stop exporting our prohibitionist approach to drugs.