I'm not a fan of gun control laws at all. I believe I should be able to order a rocket launcher off of the internet and have it shipped to my house--a house with a CIWS mounted on top just for the lulz.
But there are laws, and some of those involve the export of firearms. I don't lose a lot of sleep over those since the reasons for them make sense. Why send guns out of the country where they can then potentially be used against us? It doesn't infringe on my right to keep and bear arms, so I don't lose a moment's sleep over it.
Which is why I'm not worked up over these five chuckleheads being arrested.
The Justice Department arrested five men across Texas after accusing the group of illegally purchasing firearms and trafficking the weapons to drug cartels in Mexico, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas announced Monday.
In a superseding indictment filed earlier this month, the Justice Department charged each of the men with conspiracy to straw purchase firearms and to smuggle the weapons across the U.S.-Mexico border — two criminal offenses recently established by the 2022 federal bipartisan gun safety bill.
According to court documents, Gerardo Rafael Perez Jr. of Laredo coordinated the purchase of more than 100 firearms with the intent of transporting the weapons to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Four other men — Francisco Alejandro Benavides, Mark Anthony Trevino Jr., Luis Matias Leal and Antonio Osiel Casarez — were also arrested on Wednesday.
...
The Indictment named seven co-defendants alongside Perez who allegedly assisted with the purchase and smuggling of firearms across the southern border.
Court documents alleged that the co-conspirators would purchase expensive, “military-grade” guns from both licensed and unlicensed dealers before transporting the firearms out of the country. The Justice Department said that Perez’s organization allegedly purchased FNH SCAR rifles, Barrett .50 caliber rifles, FNH M294S rifles, and M1919 rifles.
“They are symbols of cartel profit, power, and prestige due in part to their high price to purchase and operate,” the indictment read. “Mexican drug trafficking cartels use these weapons to engage in battle with their enemies and exert control over their claimed territory.”
In other words, these five stand accused of buying guns with the intention of smuggling them across the border into Mexico where they'll be handed over to the cartels, who in turn will commit horrific acts of violence. Then those acts of violence and the use of US-made weapons in the commission of those acts will be used to justify gun control here.
It's not like we haven't seen this before.
This is why something like Operation Thor should never have been canceled. That operation was intended to prevent things just like this.
As such, our question isn't how these five came so close to getting away with it but just how many others actually did get away with it.
That's a problem, in part because of the fact that those guns are then used to justify calls for gun control here, as well as lawsuits meant to serve as backdoor gun control.
So no, I don't have an issue with these five being arrested and, if convicted, getting nice, long sentences at our finest correctional institutions--at least for values of "finest" that I'm sure these guys would disagree with when all is said and done.
I don't like people like this making our lives more difficult, which is what these straw purchases do, especially when the guns end up in cartel hands. Our right to keep and bear arms matters. It matters too much to let these kinds of people screw it up for us, and we're having a hard enough fight on our hands as it is.
Let them rot.
