Lawyers, Guns and Money

Is the title of the song and as the song goes, the shit has hit the fan, at least for John Hammar, an ex-Marine from Ft. Pierce, Florida, a town just a few miles north of me.  I'm sure you've heard that he's been jailed under one of Mexico's tough and comically ineffective gun control laws.  Of course your sense of comedy may differ on this point.

Seems Hammer and his friend had planned to drive across the Mexican border near Matamoros in a Winnebago filled with surfboards and camping gear -- and an old shotgun he'd inherited from his great grandfather which, as purchased from Sears, has a 24" barrel -- an inch too short for Mexico, although just fine in Florida.  US officials  told him that all he had to do was to file some papers with the Mexican authorities and it would be legal, but they were wrong and Mr. Hammar now sits chained to a cot in a Mexican jail cell hoping at least for Lawyers and money.  No more guns please.

Fox News of course is running around screaming and yelling about "trumped up charges" which seems strange, US laws about barrel length being just as arbitrary as Mexico's and carry punishments at least as severe.  In fact US laws require gun owners to know more than you'd expect the average lawyer knows and are just as arbitrary as concerns lengths and dates of manufacture and type of stock. It's possible in fact for a gun to be quite legal to send through the mail and an identical one with a one digit serial number difference to be felonious.  It's possible to own a handgun to which fitting a folding stock can put you in jail for being below a certain arbitrary barrel length.  Mexican law, unbeknownst to Hammar and his advisors, classifies a nearly antique relic from Sears Roebuck as a military weapon, a practice quite akin to the US classification of an ordinary rifle as being an assault rifle because of the shape of the stock or the country of manufacture.

But I digress.  Our Republican friends and faithful defenders of chaotic reasoning are hinting that this is all Obama's doing and that were he a real 100% American President like John Wayne, he'd be down in Matamoros waving a pair of six guns and displaying a pair of something even less attractive.  Life being somewhat less of a vintage cowboy movie than Fox would like us to think, he isn't.  He's in Washington being the president; a task that requires him to deal with more serious things like North Korea playing with ICBMs and trying to prevent the Middle East from once again dragging us into a war. Traducing Obama --  that's what Fox does.  That's what Fox is for.

I'm sure that if we still carry enough clout with Mexico, we might, or rather the Executive branch might be able to get the man released, even though pleas from Mexico to have mercy on their citizens have been rudely and routinely snubbed.  We are as you know, God's own chosen "leaders of the Free World" and fuck you very much.  I do hope we can because it looks like the man never intended to break any laws, just as so many Americans run afoul of so many counter-intuitive legal niceties of our crazy quilt of emotionally driven crime bills, bans and statutes.

Mexico, as I said, is a nice example of the failure to prevent people from  causing  problems by controlling and banning objects or substances.  That, low tax, business friendly, country with a weak government has become a slaughterhouse despite it's tough, restrictive gun laws and the even tougher gun laws in China have produced a flood of  mass school stabbings and that country is now considering registering kitchen knives and cleavers.  Meanwhile, despite stringent gun control measures, and because of its drug laws, the drug cartels have made Matamoros one of the most dangerous places in the hemisphere. The jail in question recently lost 20 inmates  in a single gang related fight despite the illegality of weapons in a prison.

Is there a lesson we even need to consider thinking about?  Is tough talk and tough law the best solution to systemic failures of a society, or are such policies the result of  parsimony and a distaste for looking for the roots of problems?  Is the prohibition of  Marijuana and "get tough" drug laws the root failure here? Oh but we're Americans so why consider what happens abroad as being a lesson?  We're unique!

Same old, same old

Seems "the most liberal Senator in all of American History" is even more of a hide bound conservative than I imagined, if it's true that he intends to beef up the misbegotten War on Drugs rather than admit that the 73 year old enterprise has succeeded on doing to drug use, to organized crime and public safety what the Volstead act did when it made private alcohol sales and consumption a crime.

President Barack Obama's new drug czar, former Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske told us just 8 months ago that the idiocy was over, that "We're not at war with people in this country" but action speaks louder than words.

The new budget for fiscal 2011's war on drugs is increased and the emphasis is still on "enforcement" which means more spitting on constitutional rights, more interference with private matters, more clogging up of courts, more disrupted families, more crime, more prisons training more harmless people to be criminals and more ruining the lives of innocent people. In fact it's more of George W. Bush and it's more of what has only made things worse and worse. Even so, that 15.5 billion dollar budget vastly understates the cost to the nation as much as that of our former administration because it ignores the huge cost of incarceration and due process.

From "the war on drugs is over" to

"In a time of tight budgets and fiscal restraint, these new investments are targeted at reducing Americans' drug use and the substantial costs associated with the health and social consequences of drug abuse"

took us only 8 months and a return to doing what always fails; a return to pseudomoralistic prohibitions, fraudulent medical data and a continuation of being the biggest jailer in the world makes liars out of the idiots shouting "Liberal" as much as it makes liars of our administration.

One toke over the line

Porque no tiene,
Porque le falta,
Marijuana que fumar.

I wonder how long we'll be able to keep the US/Mexico border under control with the number of crossings sure to increase by a factor of a hundred at any moment now. I have a feeling millions of Americans will be on their way south now that Mexico has decriminalized Heroin, Cocaine, LSD, methamphetamines and Marijuana.

Andale! Arriba!

Raw Story reported this morning that small amounts of these drugs would now be tolerated.

"Prosecutors said the new law sets clear limits that keep Mexico's corruption-prone police from shaking down casual users and offers addicts free treatment to keep growing domestic drug use in check."

It won't do much to hurt tourism either. It remains to be seen whether they will see the same influx of foreign stoners that the Netherlands has had to deal with and the same problems with petty crime, but it is an indication that Mexico at least, is tired of doing the same thing that's been making the situation worse and worse for nearly a century and trying to do something that won't feed the plague of violence and corruption.

"The new law sets out maximum "personal use" amounts for drugs, also including LSD and methamphetamine. People detained with those quantities no longer face criminal prosecution"

said Mexican attorney general Bernardo Espino del Castillo. Thanks Bernie and see y'all south of the border.
Down Mexico way.


*Disclaimer -- the above post does not necessarily reflect the views of Capt. Fogg or anyone in particular and is intended to be a farcical and sophomoric attempt to get some laughs -- and you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.