Enough is Enough

The drug-fueled violence in Mexico has become so routine that new reports of it barely register any more. It's like those damned vuvuzelas during the World Cup - at first, they were all you heard, but by the end of the tournament you hardly noticed them. However, the most recent flurry struck a little close to home.

Twelve people, including two civilians and a soldier, died in Nuevo Laredo in gunbattles that broke out in broad daylight between suspected drug traffickers and the Mexican army, officials said.

Nearly two dozen people were injured in Friday's shootouts, including numerous children who were riding in a bus shot up by the gunmen as they tried to escape, a source said.

Got that? Narcoterrorist gunmen shot up a school bus full of kids to facilitate their escape. Kids. In a school bus.

It's gotten so bad that schools in Mexico now have 'shootout drills.'

Schools across Mexico are teaching students to dive to the floor and cover their heads as urban gunfights between drug gangs multiply in the violence-torn country.

At least nine shootouts have erupted in school zones since mid-October, three of them in the past month. On June 15, soldiers and gunmen battled for an hour just 60 feet from a preschool in the central town of Taxco.

 My kids go to school. In a school bus. I cannot fathom anyone using a school bus as a target. Or engaging in a gun battle near a school. I guess that's the difference between a normal human being and a terrorist.

Just to make it perfectly clear, I consider the people creatures involved in smuggling drugs to be terrorists. They have no regard for human life or civilized practices. They have attacked U.S. consulates, killed U.S. embassy employees, shot up government buildings on the U.S. side of the border, threatened U.S. LEOs in Arizona (here and here) and Texas, and now have even resorted to that staple of terrorists, the car bomb.

And notice the pattern. The level of violence is increasing, and spreading north. Does anyone seriously think that if we ignore it and stick our heads in the sand that it will go away? 

As far as I'm concerned, we should treat them no different than that al-Qaeda scum. Shot 'em on sight. Labeling drug smugglers as terrorists also removes any lingering posse comitatus issues with using the military to help secure our borders.

So beef up the law enforcement presence along the border. Use technology such as ground sensors, infrared and night vision cameras, and aerial reconnaissance. Bring in the military to conduct terrorist interdiction, apprehension, and elimination operations. Get serious about this. Don't wait until your kids' school buses get shot up - or worse.

And for what it's worth, I hold the customers of those narcoterrorists equally responsible. Remove the demand, and a lot of the problems would disappear.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not necessarily opposed to a little tooting. But I do hope that all you Cheech and Chong types out there man up and admit to the consequences of your actions. It's like Prohibition. Making booze illegal led to the rise of organized crime. Making it legal resolved some problems, while creating others. But on the whole I think we'd be better off legalizing marijuana. At the very least it'd give the government a whole new revenue stream, which I'm sure they wouldn't fritter away.

But's that a subject for another day......