Fed Up Mexican Citizens Defy Laws, Arm Themselves and Form Self-Defense Squads to Fight Cartels

Citizens in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero are fed up with the government’s failure to do anything to curb the rising violence from the countries numerous drug cartels.
The citizens are further fed up with Mexican gun laws, which prohibit them from owning weapons which might allow them to actually fight back and form a deterrent to the cartels.
Now these citizens are taking matters into their own hands.
They are arming themselves with whatever firearms they can get their hands on, forming “self-defense squads”, setting up their own roadside checkpoints, and doing volunteer patrols.
Most are armed with old hunting rifles, shotguns, aging revolvers and other basic firearms.
In some areas, citizens in groups of as many as 200 do regular patrols around villages and towns.
In just under a month, the squads have managed to reduce violence in the areas where both local police and federal authorities have failed.
“When the people are united, it doesn’t matter if it’s a .22, a 16-gauge shotgun or 20-gauge. It’s that when we are united, not even bullets from an AK-47 can defeat us,” said the self-defense commander in Las Mesas. “They can’t kill us all.”
Someone needs to get these folks some modern sporting rifles and put them on par with the cartels that were armed by the United States government’s Fast and Furious program.


Read the full article here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/21/mexico-self-defense...