Apparently unaware of the mass public shootings that occurred during the presidency of Barack Obama, former Mexican President Vicente Fox blamed the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on the “violent racist rhetoric stemming from the White House.”
“When you speak out of the White House this aggressive, violent language, when you discriminate, when you’re a racist, that’s what you get,” the former Mexican president said Friday evening on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher.”
According to Fox News,
Fox said he had to “stand up” to Trump in light of statements made that he said offended hundreds of millions of Mexican people.
“We need harmony. We need love. We need happy communities,” Fox said in the wake of the shooting that killed 17 and wounded several others.
He reiterated his promise that Mexico will not pay for the president’s proposed border wall and held up a sign reading “I arrived here by tunneling.”
Fox also discussed the state of drug cartels and illicit narcotics in Mexico and the United States, saying that his country is hosting a Global Cannabis Summit to seek legalization of marijuana.
He said such a move would deflate the price of drugs, dissuading criminals from using that particular form of commerce as their enterprise.
It’s ironic that he’d acknowledge the drug violence in his own country, because as a result, the nation has more gun homicides than the United States with roughly a third of the population.
While there is a right to own a gun in Mexico, few exercise it because of how heavily restricted it is. There’s just one place in all of Mexico where you can legally buy a gun, and it’s in an anonymous building on an army base in the capital, staffed by soldiers. Those who enter must surrender any cell phones and pass through a metal detector.
The store only sold 10,115 guns in 2015, and that was a massive surge over earlier years. Only 549 guns were sold in the year 2000. And despite that, the nation is ravaged by gun violence as a result of the lawlessness created by drug cartels. Contrary to popular belief, drug trafficking is now only a slice of the revenues for the drug cartels. Most get a large chunk of their money through extortion: making business owners in cartel territory pay “protection money” to the cartels. I mention this only because earlier Fox appeared to be under the impression that legalizing marijuana will somehow reduce cartel violence, when most cartels no longer have drugs as their primary source of revenue, and cocaine and methamphetamine account for most drug revenue.
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