The murder of nine Americans by Mexican drug cartels is likely to rattle a lot of people. For myself, I have a lot of good friends who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, much as the victims were. They, too, were rattled. Probably far more than me.

So when I saw a headline pop up in my feed saying a relative of the slain family advocates for gun control, I wanted to hear her thinking. It turns out, though, that The Daily Mail managed to botch it. The truth is quite different.

Kendra Miller, whose sister-in-law was among the nine LeBaron family members gunned down in Sonora state on Monday, claims her family was specifically targeted to wage a war between rival cartels.

…

Miller brought up the issue of gun control and urged Americans to fight against any bans on weapons.

‘I don’t know where you’re standing on the whole (idea of) trying to take away the guns in America right now, but I say fight for those guns,’ she said.

‘These things are happening here in Mexico because people can’t protect themselves because by law they’re not allowed to own these guns.

‘So since the government isn’t doing their job of protection in the way that they should, these cartels can just wreak havoc and the people are left defenseless.

‘So I say hold onto your guns, people.’

I couldn’t agree more.

As I noted on Wednesday, a good deal of the problem Mexico currently has is that they didn’t trust the ordinary citizens with firearms. When coupled with the rampant corruption there, it created a perfect environment for the cartels to flourish. After all, the police weren’t going to do anything and the ordinary citizens couldn’t.

Now, it’s not completely accurate to say they can’t own guns. The Mexican constitution does preserve the right to gun ownership, at least in theory. They just make it so difficult to legally own a gun that it amounts to the same thing.

Yet the cartels have no problem getting guns. They’re not traveling to Mexico city after months of waiting and mountains of paperwork just so they can buy a single firearm. They’re getting them illegally and then using them illegally.

Meanwhile, the good, decent Mexican people are forced to cower in a corner because not only are the bad guys running rampant, the police either can’t or won’t do anything.

These days, though, it’s a matter of “can’t.”

After all, one of the cartels defeated the Mexican army in battle. That was just days after hammering the police pretty severely too. They’ve now grown too large, too powerful to be defeated easily.

It didn’t have to be this way and Miller is right that they got to where they are now because of a disarmed populace. While militias have sprung up to try and combat them, it’s too little, too late. Especially for nine Americans, most of whom were children, who never did anything to anyone.