The Mexican insurgency

In Mexico, things are pretty clearly out of control. And the meme infecting our country is that guns flow South while drugs flow North from Mexico.

And while it is true that some semi-automatic weapons do make their way from the US to Mexico, that doesn't account for this

Mexican drug cartels are now as heavily armed as America’s enemies during the Iraq war and are extending their bloody conflict into the United States, say security experts.

Law enforcement agencies in American cities close to the border with Mexico — including San Diego in California, and El Paso in Texas — are “gearing up” for street confrontations with the drug gangs, which are armed with rockets and grenades and have brought death and chaos south of the border.

I'm sorry, but you do not get a granade launchers and rockets from your local gun shop.

U.S. law enforcement officials say they detected the smuggling of grenades and other military-grade equipment into Mexico about a year and a half ago, and observed a sharp uptick in the use of the weapons about six months ago.

The Mexican government said it has seized 2,239 grenades in the last two years, in contrast to 59 seized over the previous two years.

This stuff isn't coming from the US. So where is it coming from?

Most of these weapons are being smuggled through Central American countries or by sea, eluding U.S. and Mexican monitors focused on the smuggling of semiautomatic and conventional weapons purchased from dealers in U.S. border states.

Drug organizations appear to be taking advantage of a robust black market and porous borders, especially between Mexico and Guatemala. Some of the weapons are left over from wars the United States helped fight in Central America, U.S. officials said.

However, the impression that the Mexican drug insurgency is fueled by US guns can be used as a pretext to re-instituting the assault weapon ban.

The attorney general also suggested that re-instituting a U.S. ban on the sale of assault weapons would help reduce the bloodshed in Mexico, where last year 6,000 people were killed in drug-related violence.

Increasingly, U.S. law enforcement officials see cartel violence spill into the United States, often as far away as Phoenix and Atlanta.

And while I do not agree with an assault weapons ban, if we want to reduce the spill-over of this insurgency into the US, I would support this

The Obama administration on Tuesday announced sharp increases in the number of federal agents and the use of high technology along the Mexican border, as part of a series of steps aimed as much at preventing violence from spilling into the United States as at stemming the flow of drugs and money....

Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, told reporters that she was still considering standby plans for the use of National Guard reserves. She said she would be discussing the issue Thursday with Governor Rick Perry of Texas....

The Homeland Security Department plans to double the size of both its border enforcement task forces and its violent criminal aliens teams; to triple the number of intelligence analysts along the southwest border, and to quadruple the number of border liaison officers working with Mexican law enforcement officials, the White House said.

But I do hope the Obama Administration is preparing for the possibility of Mexico becoming a failed state  of Mexican drug lords aligned with Islamists and sitting on our border.

The head of the U.S. National Guard Bureau said the link between terrorism and drug cartels along the United States' border with Mexico is increasingly clear.

Gen. Craig McKinley, chief of the National Guard Bureau, called the National Guard critical in helping protect the United States in the event of a terrorist attack and the growing threat of violent drug cartels operating along the Southwestern border with Mexico, the bureau reported.

McKinley, who addressed the National Guard's 2009 Domestic Operations Workshop, said the drug cartels in Latin America are clearly connected to organized criminal groups who support and funnel money to terrorist organizations.

It's a two way street.