It would be misleading to call George Iknadosian a gunrunner, per se. The Arizona man didn't actually run the guns; he just sold them to ghost-buyers for Mexican drug cartels - in large quantities, with fraudulent documentation and for an unknown-but-likely long period of time.
Iknadosian will be going on trial in the near future for supplying the Sinaloa cartel in Western Mexico with weapons ranging from large-caliber handguns to high-powered automatic rifles. The weapons Iknadosian sold are considered under Mexican legislature to be military weaponry, and are therefore illegal to own.
These weapons are protected under the Second Amendment of the U.S Constitution, and here lies the problem.
It's all well and good to talk about the sanctity of constitutional rights, but when our constitutional right to possess AK-47s ends up arming a bloodthirsty criminal organization in a neighboring country thanks to the strength of the American business ethic, doesn't that make us the bad guys?
The truth is our gun laws are arming another terrorist organization, one that is in its own way just as bad as al-Qaeda. In the past few years, both the Mexican and United States governments have begun cracking down on the activities of the cartels in order to stem the flow of foreign drugs over our borders and diminish the kind of brutal public crimes the cartels are known for in Mexico.
The result has been the death of more than 6,000 Mexican citizens in the past year, all attributable to the cartels - and we're arming them.
Now, this is not to say that we are responsible for their actions. The cartels are the ones responsible for the violence; they commit the atrocities, not us. But we have the power to stunt their power considerably. We can help here.
We don't even have to take away every cattle rancher's right to a .50 caliber automatic rifle, which he needs for coyotes. We just need to control the flow of these weapons. This is the future - we can't Lojack a rifle?
We're only separated from responsibility for this by two degrees. Those guns are ours, and we sold them to people that we knew were killers of civilians. We have a responsibility to help stop this.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
