You won't find that stuff at a gun show

I've mentioned before one of the problems (one of many) with the idea that the drug violence in Mexico can somehow be blamed on inadequate gun laws in the U.S. I refer to the fact that in a growing number of cases, the weapons involved are either banned outright for ownership by private citizens, or are extremely heavily regulated--weapons such as belt-fed machine guns, grenades (both hand grenades and grenades from launchers), RPGs, plastic explosive, and mortars.

What surprises me is seeing even the L.A. Times picking up on this.

The Feb. 21 attack on police headquarters in coastal Zihuatanejo, which injured four people, fit a disturbing trend of Mexico's drug wars. Traffickers have escalated their arms race, acquiring military-grade weapons, including hand grenades, grenade launchers, armor-piercing munitions and antitank rockets with firepower far beyond the assault rifles and pistols that have dominated their arsenals.

Most of these weapons are being smuggled from Central American countries or by sea, eluding U.S. and Mexican monitors who are focused on the smuggling of semiauto- matic and conventional weapons purchased from dealers in the U.S. border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

But how could that be? I thought the U.S. was the "Arms Bazaar for Mexican Cartels." I thought the Mexican violence was due to "Too Many Guns" in the U.S. I thought we needed to stop importing politically incorrect rifles, because importing them here means they end up in Mexico (?). Back to the L.A. Times article:

These groups appear to be taking advantage of a robust global black market and porous borders, especially between Mexico and Guatemala. Some of the weapons are left over from the wars that the United States helped fight in Central America, U.S. officials said.

That last sentence kinda sheds a different light on the "95% of recovered crime weapons in Mexico come from the U.S." line we're constantly being fed, doesn't it?

Read the full article at L.A. Times--it has a lot of information about the growing use in Mexico of weapons much heavier than "assault weapons" we're told must be banned, and aside from taking a swipe at .50 caliber rifles, is reasonably balanced.