Guns Galore

If you've been watching the Repub presidential debates, you know that Texas governor Rick Perry has been running a one-man army fighting the Mexican drug cartels. CNN noted in that New Hampshire, he

signaled Saturday he would be open to sending U.S. troops into Mexico to combat drug cartels should the situation arise.

After speaking at a house party in Manchester, the Texas governor was asked a series of questions about the border and his stance on illegal immigration.

He said the leaders of Mexico and the U.S. should meet after next year's elections to address the deadly drug trade in that country.

"It may require our military in Mexico working in concert with them to kill these drug cartels and to keep them off of our border," Perry said.

Campaign press secretary Robert Black said Perry wanted to cooperate with the Mexican government and wasn't ruling anything out.

"He's going to work with the Mexican government to do what's necessary," Black said.

There is something that Perry, as Texas governor, may be uniquely qualified to do- not invading Mexico, but trying to stem purchases of guns in Texas which are transferred to drug cartels. The Houston Chronicle reported in May

Once the federal law banning assault weapons expired in 2004, so-called "straw purchasers“ have flooded U.S. gun stores in the Southwest, mostly in Texas and Arizona, sweeping up these and other weapons. Court documents show such purchasers buying as many as 20 AK-47s at a time, paying as much as $11,000 in cash.

The weapons are sold legally but the purchasers must sign a U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives document saying they are buying the guns for themselves. Straw purchases for others are a violation of federal firearms law.

Typically, the purchaser turns the guns over to a broker who takes them across the border to Mexico, where such weapons cannot be bought legally. The weapons are sold to the cartels, often for three or four times the original price.

MSNBC.com reported in April that global intelligence firm Stratfor maintains

the presence of cartels has been documented in more than 230 U.S. cities.

The number of American deaths pales in comparison to the Mexican death toll from the violence: 15,273 in 2010 alone, according to the Mexican government.

But some U.S. law enforcement officials closest to the border say that new aggressiveness by the cartels — including threats to target U.S. law enforcement officers — and increasing drug gang violence on the U.S. side of the border mean that more Americans will die if the U.S. and Mexico can’t soon turn the tide.

And there is one thing at least Texas can do: tighten its gun laws, nearly the weakest in the nation. It won't end the problem, but it would ameliorate it and is something Rick Perry can do for his country. He'll never be President, but he can do more than almost anyone about violence on the border.

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