Once again an armed society, astonishingly, turns out not be a polite society:

MEXICO CITY -- Authorities are sounding the alarm about an influx of assault rifles, armor-piercing pistols and fragmentation grenades from the United States, weapons that they say are increasingly being used to kill police and soldiers fighting drug cartels.

...At least 11,752 U.S.-sold guns have been found in Mexico since January 2003 -- a tiny fraction of what remains on the streets, according to the report.

... one indicator of a new gun glut is the fact that hit men drop their guns at crime scenes rather than be caught with them afterward, knowing they are easily replaced, a senior U.S. law enforcement official in Mexico said....

Particularly worrisome are U.S. sales of Belgian-made FN-57 pistols. These fire bullets that "will defeat most body armor in military service around the world today," according to the Remtek weapons site on the Internet. They sell for $800-$1,000 each at dozens of gun stores within a day's drive of the border.

The weapons were unheard of in Mexico until they were used to kill at least a half dozen police officers this year....

"U.S. laws allow citizens to have guns that are authentically warlike," Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora complained at a recent news conference. "We have to find a more effective way of stopping these arms from flowing into the country and giving these gangs such significant firepower."

Yeah, well, good luck with that. We have our precious culture to defend!

The U.S. Congress has so far resisted these calls. It's particularly easy to buy weapons at the thousands of U.S. gun shows held each year, where the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives stopped checking addresses of gun buyers after the National Rifle Association complained that sales plummeted.

Mexico also wants lawmakers in Washington to loosen restrictions on who can see gun-purchasing data, but that's unlikely given the strong opposition from the NRA.

The U.S. government is now restricted in many cases from sharing such information with local police departments, let alone the Mexican government, making it difficult to trace illegal guns or arrest weapons traffickers.

Mexican officials also complain that U.S. judges give firearms traffickers lighter sentences than drug dealers.

Hey, Mexico should enforce the law better (never mind that smugglers are so well armed that they're literally threatening to kill Mexican border agents who try to enforce the law). Or maybe the citizenry should demand repeal of Mexico's strict gun laws so the country can be even more awash in guns, because, as everybody knows, more guns equals less crime (after all, near-universal ownership of guns is doing such a great job of deterring armed thugs in Iraq). Oh, and America should seal the borders! (That's what the Freepers say in response to this article, when they're not snickering over a few mistakes in the use of gun terminology, as if that invalidates the whole story. And really, they're right, aren't they? Let's just seal the border -- it wouldn't cost us more than a few billion dollars, right? Oh, and throw in another tax cut while you're at it.)

Whatever you do, don't touch America's gun culture! Hey, the right of any scumbag on the planet to walk into a gun show in Texas and buy any weapon he wants, no questions asked, is sacrosanct!