Gypsy Jan
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Mexico Journal - At a Nation's Only Gun Shop, Looking North in Disbelief
From The New York Times
MEXICO CITY - "Juan García relinquished his cellphone, walked through two metal detectors, registered with a uniformed soldier - and then finally
entered Mexico's only legal gun store.
To anyone familiar with the 49,762 licensed gun dealers in the United States or the 7,261 gun-selling pawn shops, the place looked less like a store
than a government office. Customers waited on metal chairs near a fish tank to be called up to a window to submit piles of paperwork. The guns hung in
drab display cases as if for decoration, with not a single sales clerk offering assistance.
The goal of the military-run shop seemed to be to discourage people from buying weapons, and even gun lovers like Mr. García, 45, a regular at a local
shooting club, said that was how it should be.
"If you want to stop someone who gets mad at their wife or the world from running out and buying a gun and killing everyone, you have to make it
hard," said Mr. García, who waited two months for the approval to buy a .38-caliber pistol. "It's the only way to make people think."
Mexicans and Americans share many things - a love for pickup trucks, beef, national flags and family - but when it comes to guns, the two countries
are feuding neighbors. Each has its own vastly different approach for controlling firearms, and while neither the restrictive gun laws in Mexico nor
the more permissive model in the United States has stopped bullets from flying, people on both sides of the border always ask why the people next door
are so terribly violent.
Americans look at Mexico and see a country of relentless bloodshed, where heads are rolled into discos, where mutilated bodies show up a dozen at a
time and where more than 60,000 people have been killed since the government began its assault on drug traffickers in 2006.
But Mexicans see their northern neighbor as awash in violence, too. They look with amazement at the ease with which guns can be purchased in the
United States and at the gory productions coming out of Hollywood, and they shake their heads at the mass shootings last year in Tucson and last week
in Aurora, Colo.
Why, Mexicans ask, don't Americans tighten their gun laws? Doing so, they say, would stanch the violence both in the United States and in Mexico,
where criminal groups wreak havoc with military-grade weapons smuggled in from the United States.
President Felipe Calderón has in fact been hammering this message for years, with ever more zeal. In February, he unveiled a three-ton billboard in
Ciudad Juárez - made from crushed, confiscated guns - with the message "no more weapons," written in English, and easily visible from the Texas side
of the border.
This week, he also used Twitter to respond to the Colorado massacre with a similar demand. "Because of the Aurora, Colo., tragedy, the American
Congress must review its mistaken legislation on guns," he wrote. "It's doing damage to us all."
The United States-Mexico gun divide was not always so wide. Article 10 of Mexico's 1857 Constitution declared, much like the American Second
Amendment, that "every man has the right to bear arms for his security and legitimate defense." But since then, the country has veered from the
American model.
Thee 1917 Constitution written after Mexico's bloody revolution, for example, says that the right to carry arms excludes those weapons forbidden by
law or reserved for use by the military, and it also states that "they may not carry arms within inhabited places without complying with police
regulations."
The government added more specific limits after the uprisings in the 1960s, when students looted gun stores in Mexico City. So under current law,
typical customers like Rafael Vargas, 43, a businessman from Morelos who said he was buying a pistol "to make sure I sleep better," must wait months
for approval and keep his gun at home at all times.
His purchase options are also limited: the largest weapons in Mexico's single gun store - including semiautomatic rifles like the one used in the
Aurora attack - can be bought only by members of the police or the military. Handgun permits for home protection allow only for the purchase of
calibers no greater than .38, so the most exotic option in the pistol case here consisted of a Smith & Wesson revolver selling for $803.05.
Mr. Vargas, like some other customers, said the rules were a tad overbearing. "It's too hard to get a gun here," he said. But he added, "In the United
States, it's far too easy."
Many Mexicans acknowledge that Mexican violence would not disappear even if American laws were more restrictive. "If the criminals didn't get their
guns from the U.S., they would just get them from somewhere else," said Mr. García, the gun club member.
The worst mass murderers in Mexico and the United States also look very different to people here. Gustavo de la Rosa, a human rights investigator in
Chihuahua, the border state that includes Ciudad Juárez, said that the surge of mass killers in both countries was the result of societies that divide
the population into winners and losers, in which "there are a lot of ways to lose and very few ways to win."
But he said, "The losers in the United States are condemned to lose - like in the Greek tragedies, they have no salvation - and they kill out of
vengeance against the society that has beaten them."
In Mexico, Mr. de la Rosa said, "our monsters complete an objective," killing because it is a job that helps them earn more money, rise from poverty
or satisfy a boss looking to intimidate rivals in the abyss of organized crime.
Regardless of motivation, Mexicans all over the country say this much is clear: Mass murders reflect and reproduce a culture of violence in which
killing is glorified as a way to achieve fame, fortune or both. Even in Mexico's gun store, and at the premiere of the latest Batman movie on Monday
night in Mexico City, there was more concern about family values than gun laws.
Many people said that the only way to stop severe violence was to make sure that in both Mexico and the United States, the costs of heinous crime
outweigh the perceived benefits.
"It's an issue of collective conscience," said Gildardo Olazaran, 31, Mr. García's nephew, who accompanied him to the gun store. "Our best hope is to
make it like tobacco - something that used to be cool."
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness.”
—Mark Twain
\"La vida es dura, el corazon es puro, y cantamos hasta la madrugada.” (Life is hard, the heart is pure and we sing until dawn.)
—Kirsty MacColl, Mambo de la Luna
\"Alea iacta est.\"
—Julius Caesar
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captkw
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GUNS
THANKS JAN..AND WHAT IS HAPPENING ABOUT "FAST AND FURIUS" ?? K & T 
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bacquito
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Informative, I agree that restrictions to purchase some types of weapons in the U.S. need to be increased.
bacquito
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Udo
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Highly informative Jan, thanks!
Even though I am a gun proponent, I do largely agree that many weapons should not be sold to anyone, gun collectors included. I also thing that there
should be a limit on how many guns a person can own.
I am all for protecting someone's gun rights in the US, but having a roomful of weapons and thousands upon thousands of ammo rounds?...what are they
expecting WWIII?
Udo
Youth is wasted on the young!
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MrBillM
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Oh, IF only ...........................
When looking at Mexico and the U.S., it is SO clear that there are SO many things that Mexico does right.
And we do wrong.
It is PROBABLY the MAIN reason that Mexico is the Economic powerhouse of the Western Hemisphere with the highest standard of
living and greatest freedoms for its inhabitants and America falls so short in living conditions, income, infrastructure and civil liberties.
IF ONLY we could be more like them.
We'll just have to wish for now, I guess.
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Lee
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Yeah you don't read about MX kids (young adults) going into theaters or restaurants and shooting the place up. Leave that to the cartel.
A kid with a Glock, double stack magazine, can shoot a lot of people. Restrict that? Sure glad I stocked up when I did.
Tighter laws around guns? Funny. Not as long as there are Republicans in the world. Go Repubs!
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captkw
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mr bill
america does not have the highest standards,healthcare,freedom,schools in the world !! get your head out of the sand..K&T
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Bajajorge
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Yeah, gun control really works in Mexico.
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