Calderon pushes for U.S. to reinstate assault weapon ban
At White House Rose Garden press conference yesterday following a meeting with President Obama and Stephen Harper of Canada, Mexican President Felipe Calderon had some blunt words about U.S. gun control policy: "The expiring of the assault weapons ban in the year 2004 coincided almost exactly with the beginning of the harshest – the harshest ...
At White House Rose Garden press conference yesterday following a meeting with President Obama and Stephen Harper of Canada, Mexican President Felipe Calderon had some blunt words about U.S. gun control policy:
At White House Rose Garden press conference yesterday following a meeting with President Obama and Stephen Harper of Canada, Mexican President Felipe Calderon had some blunt words about U.S. gun control policy:
"The expiring of the assault weapons ban in the year 2004 coincided almost exactly with the beginning of the harshest – the harshest – period of violence we’ve ever seen,"[…] In remarks to reporters in the Rose Garden, Calderon urged the U.S. to do more to tamp down on gun trafficking and emphasized that the drug cartels that crime organizations are operating on both sides of the border. He claimed a direct connection between the weakening of gun laws in the U.S. and deaths in his country.
"I know that if we don’t stop the traffic of weapons into Mexico, if we don’t have mechanisms to forbid the sale of weapons such as we had in the ’90s, or for registry of guns, at least for assault weapons, then we are never going to be able to stop the violence in Mexico or stop a future turning of those guns upon the U.S.," he said.
Obama, whose administration has not pushed to reinstate the ban, did not respond to the Mexican president’s statement directly.
As Kathleen Hennessey notes to McClatchy, Obama and congressional democrats have largely "called a truce when it comes to advancing new gun control legislation" and any movement on the assault weapons ban is pretty unlikely during an election year. Neither leader mentioned the controversial "fast and furious" gun-running program, currently under investigation by Congress.
In the past year, Calderon — now a lame duck — has become more strident in his criticisms of U.S. policy. Speaking at the U.N. last September, he suggested that drug consumer countries like the United States were "morally obliged" to consider "market alternatives" to drug enforcement.
Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating
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