How to stem flow of U.S. guns into Mexico

Re “Guns Flow Easily Into Mexico From the U.S.,” Jan. 8

You assert that it is our guns that sprout legs, run to Mexico and cause crime. The Mexican drug trade, government corruption and murder -- all made possible by assemblages of inanimate metal parts made in El Norte. You lament the ease with which guns traverse Texas’ “porous, 1,240-mile-long border with Mexico.”

I think you’re right, and you have now given us an irrefutable reason to build a 20-foot-high bulletproof wall along our southern border: to protect Mexico from our guns. No longer will peaceful illegal aliens be forced to run the gantlet into our violent country.

I’m sure they will be much safer and, as a result, be more prosperous in Mexico.

MARC ATKINSON

Simi Valley

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The article about Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and its spurt of violence is a sad sign of the times. You state that the city has become a tragic symbol of gun violence, but the more simple truth is that it is a symbol of the violence attendant to drug prohibition and its utter corruption.

Just as liquor prohibition generated such violent and obscene events as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre way back when, 95 years of drug prohibition have taken us to the point that many Mexicans are heavily armed and killing each other over drug sales.

The guns are simply tools to enforce a system of business that has been forced to operate outside the law. That could be changed as easily as writing a new law, but people are afraid to talk about it. Shame on those people.

RICHARD SINNOTT

Fort Pierce, Fla.