NRA To Mexican Drug Cartels: We’ve Got Your Back

by Stuart Shapiro

We’ve all come to expect the NRA to jump up and fight any attempt to regulate guns.  But I have to admit, even I was surprised at their latest venture.

The National Rifle Association filed a lawsuit on Wednesday challenging a new federal regulation requiring gun merchants along the border with Mexico to report bulk sales of certain semiautomatic rifles . . . The rule is meant to make it harder for Mexican drug cartels to obtain military-style weapons and smuggle them to Mexico, where they are illegal to sell to consumers. American weapons — often bought by “straw buyers” who have a right to buy them for themselves — have been flooding across the Southwest border for years, fueling drug violence in Mexico.

I’m sure the NRA would argue that it is a slippery slope from preventing Mexican drug cartels from getting guns to preventing law abiding hunters from getting them.  It’s not.  Instead it is an appalling blindness that possesses zealots and leads them to fight things that anyone else would see as common sense.  Hopefully the court will throw out the lawsuit.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.