Month: March 2009

Add three more groups, in addition to the Brady Campaign, to those on the left calling for more gun control in the name of saving Mexico from its own drug cartels even though ATF says we don’t need it and Democrats in the House have made it clear that no gun control will come out of Congress. Here are quotes from various left-wing groups on the upcoming trips to Mexico by several Cabinet officials and the President:

“They are putting a lot of the cabinet on this, including the president himself,” Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center, told AFP. …

“They see this as an actual shared responsibility, that we have to actually do something about consumption, the money and the guns on our side of the border,” Selee said.

“I think that is a change in focus, actually.”

Vanda Felbab-Brown, a counter-narcotics expert at the Brookings Institution, said it could take years before the administration reaps benefits from its new approach to blunt consumer demand, which she calls the “crux of the problem.”

In the meantime, she expects Clinton and others to cooperate more on choking off the flow of weapons from thousands of weapons stores on the US side of the border, even if she doubts how effective it can be.

“There are many other sources apart from the US, from which the cartels or the trafficking organizations could acquire weapons,” Felbab-Brown told AFP.

“But I think diplomatically it’s very important that the US makes an effort to show to the Mexican authorities as well as to the Mexican public that we share responsibility,” she said.

“Just like we share responsibility for demand, we are aware that we are the source of weapons and we take efforts against them,” she added. …

Christopher Sabatini, a top analyst at the Americas Society and Council of the America, urged the administration to challenge the National Rifle Association gun lobby over the weapons supply stores.

They should “go to the mat on it with the NRA,” he said.

Just because the math seems to be in our favor for the moment, it is clear that anti-gun groups – regardless of their primary mission – are trying to put extreme pressure on Obama to burn up his political capital on gun control, with their favorite being another semi-auto rifle ban.  In 2010, we have to make sure that Congress is even more pro-gun so that Obama knows he cannot afford to pick that fight no matter how many how many groups in his base are begging for it.