[DonQuigleone]

Originally Posted by kyp275

All of which is dependent, again, on money. It's the same thing with armies, you don't get anywhere without it, it's at the core of everything.

The money flows from the cartel's strength. Not the other way around. A cartel without loyal members and weapons is a dead cartel, no amount of money can save it.

Yea, just like drugs and alcohol during the Prohibition right? You vastly underestimate the ability of arms traffickers, and the existence of the rest of the planet - since when are criminal organizations forced to source their weapons from the country they're in?

It's a matter of cost. Also, it's a lot easier to block weapons then drugs or alcohol. They're a lot heavier, and can't be made in bathtubs in your basement. Whereas you can easily transport drugs using small speedboats, weapons require large containers to transport in any large numbers. Britain's gun control works well enough that the average policeman only needs to carry a baton. An illegal gun in Britain is a very expensive prospect, due to the low supply.

Not really, it's not like the police will put up a 24/7 watch around your house for the rest of your life

You conduct a sting operation. When you're openly intimidating people, you leave a very obvious trail. Drugs work because the buyer is just as complicit as the seller.

...You don't really have much grasp on modern military either do you? you think the kind of small arms you'd be regulating with gun control laws are that powerful? Even in Mexico the government have far more military capability than the cartels.

You do not need to be more powerful then the military to challenge the government's authority, so long as you're more powerful then the police force (which is comparitively easy), you can operate fairly easily.

You're treating organized crime as some sort of insurgency with the goal of supplanting and usurping the government, which is fundamentally flawed. And even if we entertain your notion and assume it's true, your method of fighting them is local civilian gun control laws? That's trying to fight a forest fire with a toy water gun.

Insurgencies and Organized Crime are often more similiar then you realise (the Taliban are both an insurgency and heavily involved in the drug trade, the IRA's primary business is now bank robberies, money laundering, and drugs).

The reason gun control is important is that it reduces the number of guns in circulation, and consequently increases their price in the black market, making it much more difficult for crime syndicates to gain the power necessary to conduct their illicit businesses. With a functioning gun control regime they may have enough weapons for limited engagements, but nowhere near enough to conduct full on Mexico-style wars.

Crime is a social-economic issue, and that's where it'll need to be addressed. Gun is not what caused the cartels to spiral out of control in Mexico, nor would any gun control law solve those problems.

So long as an opportunity exists, organized crime will always take place. You can never eliminate your run of the mill homicides and thuggish attacks. But the level of organized crime is directly related to the degree of control a government can exert. The less it has, the less focused it is, the more opportunities exist for enterprising individuals to take advantage of the situation. If the police force is weak, or corrupt, then it's easy for organized to conduct their rackets.

Furthermore, with guns added to the equation the cost of law enforcement goes way up. If your average criminal does not have a gun (as in the UK), then they can usually be subdued by two policemen with batons. Give him a handgun, and suddenly you need multiple officers with expensive equipment to subdue him. You'll also have a lot less people volunteering for the police force if getting shot by criminals is a frequent occurence, and cops will be a lot less willing to confront criminals, after all no one wants to be a hero.

Britain has a well functioning gun control regime. Consider the London Riots last year, imagine how much worse it would have been if all those thugs had had guns? The roving gangs of them would have easily overwhelmed any honest citizen trying to defend his property, and the police would have experienced significant casualties trying to subdue them, in fact the army might have been ultimately required.

If such a riot were to occur in the US, I shudder to think what the casualties and expense to subdue it would be.