In South Florida it’s Cubans (yes, Cubans) and other Caribbean folks. In New York it’s Europeans, on the West Coast it’s Asians.

The Bishop Tutu act is unbecoming.

And the problem is Americans buying the stuff.

If there is a problem with domestic organized crime, which is usually restrained, the police flood the area, make it impossible to do business, harass individuals and in general make life miserable and business impossible until the issue is resolved. Often by organized crime itself.

What would and could they do to a Mexican drug cartel, which is willing to go to any length to intimidate. It is hard to imagine what might be effective. And once the police and judges start wearing balaclavas in order to protect their identities from the badguys, it would seem to be over. They won.

(Googling “Mexican drug cartels intimidate US law enforcement” yields a lot of examples of this starting.)

It is depressing. We had FOUR stranger danger alerts in our school district in one week.

There are days I am glad I have only twenty or so years left. The answer is not on this plane of existence. But…I am doing the best I can.

Given that the government doesn’t give a damn it may as well legalize them. A significantly larger part of the population will become incapacitated, wind up on welfare and be health problems but maybe all the money made from selling legal drugs will cover the cost. The way that cigarette taxes paid for lung cancer.

Easier access to more drugs will be devastating, but I don’t think that many people or the government cares. The people won’t care until it hits them or their families. Look how many families and friends are affected by alcohol, and it’s regarded as a model drug, legal and everything. The government has no interest in the welfare of anything but itself.

The sad thing is that the purchasers and users of illicit drugs find it necessary to mess up their minds. That’s pathetic, no matter how it’s justified. A brain is a terrible thing to screw up. I’ve found it’s easier to learn how to live than it is to run. But I’m no role model.

Remove the profit motive and the crime goes away. This is a lesson we should have learned during Prohibition. Sure, some bootlegging and moonshining is still going on, but it is nickel and dime stuff, not a vast organized criminal enterprise threatening all of society. Some of your other remarks do lead to some troubling thoughts, though.

We are a nation awash in guns, and not just sporting and home defense arms, but weapons suitable for military use and optimized for urban combat. We already have a GI Joe wannabee population obsessed by the bang, bang, shoot, shoot, kill, kill mystique. Its an infantile fantasy obscured by all sorts of bogus constitutional arguments that has allied itself with a ruthless and souless conspiracy of arms merchants. The NRA isn’t about sport or patriotism, its a corporate front and lobby for a very lucrative industry that feeds on puerile appetites, a teenage sexual obsession with firearms. It opposes even the most reasonable attempts at regulation or control because they are a threat to profits. Not all that different from a narcotics cartel, eh? These are the same guys that sold repeating rifles to the Indians, and moldy biscuit to the cavalry.

What’s worse, guns are not just a disease that strikes individual criminals or terrified citizens desperate to protect themselves from them. It has become organized and militarized. We now have heavily armed criminal drug organizations, Mafias, racist white supremacists, right wing militias, motorcycle gangs, Klansmen and other paramilitary groups, all cloaking themselves under some phony constitutional rhetoric about alleged government tyrannies and UN and other black helicopter-type conspiracies. Look how quick they were to precipitate out of nothingness in the Bundy affair. These are NOT “well-regulated militias”. They are armed gangs of thugs, no matter how many flags they wave in our face or what mealy-mouthed patriotic drivel they spout out their ass.

It is only a matter of time before other parts of the political spectrum start arming themselves and organizing in military fashion: citizens’ posses, Black Panther-type movements, even neighborhood-type defense committees. Let’s arm the Occupy Movement! Any form of civil unrest that breaks out, for any reason, even a natural disaster, will give these groups an excuse to come out ostensibly for self-defense, but eventually they will fight amongst themselves for supremacy. Setting up roadblocks, collecting tribute, enforcing justice. Just like in the Ukraine…or Nevada. “Show me your papers, citizen.”

Ironically, in the end, they will all be pleading for some strong, armed outside force with some sort of governmental authority and real military discipline to step in, crush the militias and gangs, confiscate their weapons, and impose order at the point of a bayonet. After all, their property will be in danger, which is all these goons really care about. The same jack-booted statist tyranny they claim was their reason for arming in the first place will be the only institution capable of restoring order and imposing a harsh peace.

History will record it as the second American Civil War. No doubt it will be memorialized and romanticized just like the last pointless bloodbath was.