Keeping illegal things out of US

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OnTheFly

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http://www.centredaily.com/128/story/81587.html

Cocaine purer, cheaper in U.S.
By Joshua Goodman - The Associated Press

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Cocaine prices in the United States have dropped and the drug's purity increased, despite years of effort and nearly $5 billion spent by the U.S. government to combat Colombia's drug industry, the White House drug czar acknowledged in a letter to a key senator.

The drug czar, John Walters, wrote Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, that retail cocaine prices fell by 11 percent from February 2005 to October 2006, to about $135 per gram of pure cocaine -- hovering near the same levels since the early 1990s. In 1981, when the U.S. government began collecting data, a gram of pure cocaine fetched $600.

The purity of this cocaine, meanwhile, has "trended somewhat toward former levels," as well, Walters said in the letter, citing data from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Colombia supplies 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States. Declining prices and rising purity could also suggest weakening demand, but several household and school-based surveys show that America's cocaine consumption has barely budged since 2000, and demand in Europe has increased.

Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe, is set to meet with President Bush at the White House on Wednesday to discuss U.S. support for Plan Colombia, the anti-narcotics and counterinsurgency program that has cost American taxpayers more than $4 billion since 2000.

Walters' letter to Grassley, the Republican co-chairman of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, was sent in January in response to a request from the senator. It was made available to The Associated Press by the Washington Office on Latin America, a liberal lobby group.

U.S. officials have insisted repeatedly that Plan Colombia is reducing the quality and availability of to American users.

But Grassley, in an e-mailed statement to the AP, said the new data is "all the proof that anybody needs" that the White House drug office "has gotten quite good at spinning the numbers, but cooking the books doesn't help our efforts to curb cocaine and heroin production and consumption."

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said senior U.S. Embassy officials gave him older, more encouraging data during a visit to Bogota in March -- two months after the drug czar quietly released his more downbeat appraisal.
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More proof that a gun ban wouldn't make guns unavailable in the U.S.

Fly
 
Yes, but it does imply that the quality of guns and ammo would go up if they were banned, doesn't it?


















OK, I don't see THAT happening. But I wouldn't be surprised if a much greater percentage of illegal guns were full-auto. (some might argue that that is an increase in quality :) )
 
If a Jetfire in .22 Short and a Scorpion submachinegun both get you a mandatory ten years in the pen, why not carry the buzzgun if you are intent on disobeying the gun ban anyway?
 
Simply passing a law banning something has neve worked. Some folks learned that during the Prohibition when all they did is make criminals richer.
 
Amen Eghad.

Passing laws keeping drugs out made drug smugglers richer. It didn't cost more to produce the drug. It didn't cost more to sell the drug. The only cost was accounted for in increased risk.

Economics isn't a study in money or numbers but of human behavior. Never has banning an item worked to my knowlege.

Banning certain guns didn't work- it only made the banned guns more expensive. When Ronald Reagan banned the manufacture of machine gun manufacture for civilian purposes, it didn't make them impossible to get, only more unsafe and more expensive. You can still get Class III weapons from shotgun news, but it will cost you dearly.

Hence- the government should never be in the business of banning something. They should be controlling conditions if anything, but never banning.

Illegal Immigrants are a popular one today. They find the paperwork too difficult and the process to hard to make it here, so they come here anyway illegally. We have a surplus of jobs and Latin America has a surplus of labor. The two will naturally meet. Somehow the government has got to come up with a workable solution to either allow the labor to come and then go back home, or encourage them to come and become AMERICANS. It isn't that hard of a choice. I don't care which they choose, but currently they choose the only unworkable position available.

I don't see how difficult it is to grasp that- but the government seems to have a problem. Hence- we have a flow of ILLEGAL immigration rather than well-regulated immigration. Instead- we spend billions and sometimes- trillions on trying to keep illegal labor, illegal drugs and illegal guns out of this country.
 
Economics isn't a study in money or numbers but of human behavior. Never has banning an item worked to my knowlege.

Banning certain guns didn't work- it only made the banned guns more expensive. When Ronald Reagan banned the manufacture of machine gun manufacture for civilian purposes, it didn't make them impossible to get, only more unsafe and more expensive. You can still get Class III weapons from shotgun news, but it will cost you dearly.
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Depends on the item. To my knowledge, even illegally obtained automatic weapons are fairly pricey and thus aren't generally preferred by criminals. Better to just use something compact and semi-automatic more often than not.

The effect a ban will have generally depends on several factors: the initial cost of the item, the difficulty in smuggling the item, the difficulty in producing the item locally illegally, and the level of desire (by both the public and criminals) for the item.

Marijuana, for instance, fails pretty much all of those. It's relatively cheap to start with, easy to produce and/or smuggle, and seems to be something people will have a strong desire to use/abuse regardless of legality. Hence the reason a ban hasn't worked out well. Same for alcohol.

Automatic weapons, on the other hand, are fairly expensive, relatively difficult to produce (obviously modifications on legal semi-autos can be done), slightly more difficult to smuggle (though not much), and lastly (and in this case most importantly, I'd say) the actual desire for them isn't terribly great. The average law-abiding citizen has little use for them, and the average criminal is served just as well by a cheap revolver or semi-auto...especially since investing more money in a weapon you may well have to ditch at any time is unwise. So a ban on machine guns stands to actually reduce the number of them in the hands of criminals (and the general populace). Not entirely, of course, but that's never a realistic goal to begin with.

Whether or not that was a particularly worthwhile goal, of course, is up for debate. But the point remains that relatively little harm is done and a fairly dramatic effect is achieved...thus the ban "works." More or less.

This, compared to our previously attempted ban on alcohol and current ban on marijuana: much less dramatic effect on consumption, and large amounts of harm done. Clearly not "working."

Sorry this one was even more of a rambler than usual...distracted at the moment.
 
I can't say I agree with some of the stuff here.

Automatic weapons, on the other hand, are fairly expensive, relatively difficult to produce (obviously modifications on legal semi-autos can be done), slightly more difficult to smuggle (though not much), and lastly (and in this case most importantly, I'd say) the actual desire for them isn't terribly great.
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Straight blow-back submachine guns are much more simple mechanically than practically any other repeating firearm. Cheap sub-gun designs from WWII like the M3, Sten, and PPSh were all designed to be cranked out with an absolute minimum of skilled labor and machining steps. So no, automatic weapons are not necessarily too complex to manufacture illegally. I bet a smart kid after an afternoon in the history section of the library could design one. Granted it's a little more work than watering a plant while stocking up on Twinkies in anticipation of the big day.

The average law-abiding citizen has little use for them, and the average criminal is served just as well by a cheap revolver or semi-auto...especially since investing more money in a weapon you may well have to ditch at any time is unwise. So a ban on machine guns stands to actually reduce the number of them in the hands of criminals (and the general populace). Not entirely, of course, but that's never a realistic goal to begin with.
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I would say that given the source for guns in the illegal market in the USA right now that criminals prefer revolvers or semi-auto handguns because they are more easily obtained via straw purchases or theft than by smuggling and manufacturing. Illegal automatic weapons are crowded out by cheaper substitutes more than it is a case of criminals not preferring them. I believe this was the case even in the 1920s and 1930s when U.S. citizens could legally purchase a Tommy gun at the local hardware store. Most criminals then who used automatic weapons had stolen them; frequently from the government. Of course this was prior to WWII when ultra cheap subgun design reached its apogee. So I submit this: A total ban on firearms in the USA could lead to the unintended consequence of more automatic weapons in the illegal gun supply. (as a proportion, if not comprising a bigger illegal gun supply than before :eek: )
 
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