First, Ted Cruz and other senators. I like Ted’s arguments, which focus on the second amendment and the complete unviability of a sovereign nation buckling to pressure from another nation in its own court of law. Here is the brief.
Second, twenty eight state attorneys general. Here is the brief. Here is some prose lifted out of the brief.
The First Circuit’s causation finding relied on two facts: the “‘virtual[] impossibil[ity]’ for criminals to obtain firearms legally sourced in [Mexico]” and that an “increase in gun violence in Mexico correlates with the increase of gun production in the United States[.]” Smith & Wesson, 91 F.4th at 516. But the First Circuit mistakes correlation for causation, and the relevant facts highlight that fallacy. The available evidence shows that increases in Mexico’s gun violence are unrelated to American gun manufacturing. Instead, Mexico’s gun violence epi demic stems from the Mexican government’s crackdown on the cartels—and its reluctance to finish the job. See David B. Kopel, Mexico’s Gun-Control Laws: A Model for the United States?, 18 TEX. REV. L. & POL. 27, 42-44 (2013). The First Circuit believes that American guns are “especially attractive to Mexican drug cartels,” but only a minority of guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico originated in the United States. Smith & Wesson, 91 F.4th at 516; Kopel, su pra, at 46-49. Among those guns, many were sold, not on the American retail market, but to the Mexican government. Id. at 46.
[ … ]
The First Circuit also assumed that “between seventy and ninety percent of the guns recovered at crimes scenes in Mexico were trafficked into the country from the United States.” Smith & Wesson, 91 F.4th at 516. That assumption—again central to the court’s causation finding—fails on two fronts. First, it contradicts public admissions by Mexican officials that American guns comprise a much smaller percentage of Mexican crime guns. Second, it finds—in conclusory fashion—that those crime guns are trafficked from the United States by American gun companies. But that ignores the re ality of how most of these guns end up in Mexico in the first place: purchases by the Mexican government. Starting with the court’s first error, American manufactured weapons constitute a small minority of guns recovered from crime scenes in Mexico. Re searchers believe that only about 12% of the guns recovered at those crime scenes originate from U.S. re tail gun stores. Kopel, supra, at 48.
It goes on and you can read it for yourself. I don’t like this line of argumentation at all. No doubt, all of it is true, but it also doesn’t matter in the least. No sovereign country can buckle to another in its own court. If it does, it is not a sovereign country.
But there is more. Give me some latitude and follow me on this for a moment.
Recall that we have discussed feral hogs before, and how wildlife biologists trained to hate hunters and imagine that there is an endless supply of government cash for trappers claim that hunting won’t even dent the hog population.
This just isn’t true at all. I hunted Groton Plantation twice this year, and in a few short weeks we had put enough of a dent in the population – across 23,000 acres – that while I saw plenty the first trip, I didn’t see any the second trip. It’s true enough that part of the reason for this is that we drove them nocturnal, but we also put enough pressure on the population that the grounds didn’t show the presence of hogs. There were no wallows, and no dug up food plots from hogs.
We are constantly told the truth, that deer won’t fight hogs for food. If you want to hunt deer and want a strong deer herd, you’ll kill the hogs. Kill the boars. Kill the sows. Mow down the piglets when they return to the sows after they have been shot. Kill them all and don’t wait. Do it immediately when you see them. And we do.
Commenter and reader “The Alaskan” has remarked of the hog population in the south, Texas, the Midwest, and even north of the border into Canada (where super hogs are bred who can survive the cold weather), will increase until we want it to decrease. There are feral hogs around because America chooses for there to be feral hogs around.
Too many folks benefit from them for hunting preserves, and too many urban dwellers don’t want to see weapons being openly carried, or don’t want firearms discharge in certain locations, but would rather have to run from them and worry about their children being gored to death than deal with the problem. The same thing is true for Coyotes (or Coydogs, or Coywolves).
Are you still with me?
Now. The Mexican cartels don’t exist because of American weapons. They exist because Mexico wants them to exist. Too many people financially benefit from them, or benefit from the largesse they bring in, or fear them enough to protect and abet them.
In the movie Sicario, which is certainly an entertaining movie, the character Alejandro Gillick, played by Benicio del Toro, makes a remark to the effect that “the appetite of Americans for this stuff always amazes me.” Again, this is an entertaining movie, but he misses the point, just like the court missed the point, just like the brief misses the point.
Appetites can change, or be abated, or be redirected, or be met by other means. The American moral culture is certainly sick unto death, and we’ve covered that in other posts. But the temperance movement failed because of folks making corn liquor in the mountains of Virginia and North Carolina. The war on drugs in an abysmal failure and always will be. A SWAT team cannot instill moral character and neither can gun control or legal actions against gun manufacturers.
The Mexican cartels don’t just traffic in drugs today. Their most lucrative product is humans. And kidnapping. And extortion. They will be around as long as Mexico wants them around. The cartels exist because Mexico wants them to. No amount of gun control will ever change that. Gun control won’t stop it, nor will it even slow it down. Even if the things the AGs claimed were not true and the Cartels got most of their weapons from American gun manufacturers, it still wouldn’t change anything and shutting down American gun manufacturers wouldn’t affect the Cartels in the least. The AGs have done a nice job of entrapping themselves in a fact- or proposition-structure that could turn against them in light of revised data.
This lawsuit exists because American gun companies and their insurance companies have deep pockets just like any other corporation. Any victory by Mexico in this lawsuit would likely only serve to line the pockets of the cartels anyway, further empowering them to do their evil deeds.
Meanwhile, an awful precedent will have been set where American sovereignty has been defenestrated in favor of fleecing the American buyer. It’s a bad deal all around and not what the war of independence was fought over. The founders wouldn’t have been able to fathom something like Mexico bringing lawsuit against the country they fought to begin. This is what should have been argued in the briefs.
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