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Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

In the third of our three-part series on the U.S. Government's failed 'War on Drugs,' earlier this year, we noted that drug prohibition was vital to the very existence of the deadly Mexican drug cartels. As we noted, the carnage, which included 13,000 deaths inside Mexico in "the first three quarters of 2011 --- a number that does not include the more than 5,000 people who have disappeared" --- is now spilling over the border into the U.S.

Over the past five years, some 60,000 have died in the Mexican drug war, and "the U.S. has played a big part in it," according to a new video from the Brave New Foundation on behalf of GunWar.org. The free flow of increasingly sophisticated weaponry from the U.S. to Mexico --- extremely profitable for the U.S. small arms industry and deadly for innocent civilians --- is part of the very "scourge" which the U.N. was seeking to address in its Arms Trade Treaty negotiations before the Obama Administration caved in the face of the National Rifle Association's campaign of blatant lies about the accord.

All of the Mexican carnage, as the video explains, is due, in no small part, to the tremendously lax oversight of the sale of such weapons here in the U.S., thanks to the political strong-arming by groups such as the NRA who oppose virtually any and all oversight or regulation of any type.

"Around 70% of all firearms seized in Mexico and submitted for tracing, come from the United States," Brave New World explains. "Most gun sellers don't care. The more they sell, the more they profit."

The additionally tragic irony underscoring these facts: All of this has played out even as Republicans have spent the last year or so pretending to be concerned about their so-called "Fast and Furious scandal", the poorly-considered ATF "gun walking" program begun by the Bush Administration and continued by members of the ATF based in Arizona during the Obama Administration. A federal program designed (poorly or otherwise) to try and catch gun-runners and drug lords: Bad --- at least when it's carried out by a Democratic administration. Little to no restriction on the "legal" purchase of military-grade assault weapons in the U.S., resulting in tens of thousands of them pouring over the border for decades: That's just one of the many benefit that members receive in exchange for sending their hard-earned cash to the terrorist-enabling NRA...