Meanwhile in Arizona
Crooks and Liars has noted that an undercover investigation in Arizona, conducted two weeks after the shooting of Gabby Giffords and several others, revealed that private, unlicensed firearms dealers continue to exploit a “gun show loophole” to sell guns illegally without a background check.
Reportedly, thirty percent of all guns involved in federal illegal gun trafficking investigations are connected to gun shows, and because no records are kept, these weapons are practically untraceable.
The post also mentions an article in the Los Angeles Times about a recent campaign on the part of American federal authorities to stem the flow of weapons to Mexican drug cartels – by cutting them off at their source, in Arizona.
On Tuesday, 22 January 2011, “federal authorities indicted 20 men… on charges of buying an estimated 700 weapons in Arizona and conspiring to transfer them across the border, chiefly to the Sinaloa drug cartel.”
“You’d think that Arizona,” Crooks and Liars blogger Susie Madrak notes, “whose far-right activists are always screaming about horrific crimes allegedly committed by Mexicans sneaking across the border, would catch on to the concept that loose gun sale practices put all of us at risk.”
Meanwhile, as Davey D recently noted, the terrible and totally random killing of nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green in the Tuscon rampage occurred just days before the opening arguments in the trial for the killing of Brisenia Flores, who was also nine years old when she was killed in cold blood in 2009 by vigilante border patrolers in Arizona. The parallels have prompted papers like the Village Voice to ask why the Flores story has gotten so little coverage.
Finally, over in Utah, Republican senator and Tea Party favourite Mike Lee recently said that “the shooter wins” if elected politicians choose to tone down their violent rhetoric, as many of his fellow Republicans have done.
Which admittedly isn’t as bad as, say, the co-founder of the Tuscon Tea Party arguing that Giffords should have known better than to go out in public where she might get shot. And neither statement compares to the fact that a Tea Party group in California is exploiting the shooting to raise funds.
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