Jul 142010
There has been a lot of inaccurate and dishonest blathering from Left-leaning politicians and media about how the drug war currently rampaging through northern Mexico is powered by guns procured from the US. If that’s the case… why were these guns being smuggled from Mexico to the US?
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/jul/13/us-citizen-caught-at-border-with-machine-guns/
A 20-year-old U.S. citizen was stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border crossing in Andrade on Saturday with two machine guns strapped to the engine of his pickup.
Unlike most news reports, when they say “machine guns,” they mean “machine guns.”
That looks like a Rheinmetall MG3 to me.
Yes, please, I’ll take two.
7 Responses to “Which way are those guns going?”
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It was a MG-42. The other one was a Russian SA43.
They were going _into_ Mexico BTW:
http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/newsroom/news_releases/local/07132010.xml
If the Mexican cartels are so hard up for machine guns that they are buying collector’s items like that, they really must be having a hard time getting them.
> They were going _into_ Mexico
I’ll be damned.
That doesn;t make much sense… the MG-42 is a fabulously expensive gun (around fifty grand I’d guess), while a machine gun from central America should probably only cost a few hundred bucks. My guess would be that these might be going to a collector. The ammo is a bit non-standard for day-to-day cartell shootemups, I would think, and the few photos of the weapon seem to show it in really good shape.
That’s my guess also…I think you could get far more from a collector than the drug cartels – besides, you would be a lot less likely to get shot by the collector once he had his hands on the machine guns.
On a lark I checked up on what a functional MG-42 sells for, and it’s worth around $40,000.
If you want to see something truly pointless, how about a semi-auto SA43, with enough warnings in its instruction book that it’s probably best not to own one, much less actually fire it.
http://www.centuryarms.com/manuals/Goriunov%20Rifle%20manual_FINAL.pdf
Don’t even touch the ammunition unless you want children with birth defects.
And while cleaning it, remember that it has parts as sharp as razor blades that will cut your fingers right off, assuming that the stuff that you are cleaning it with doesn’t poison you first. 😀
The plot thickens; the SA43 is the semi-auto version of the full-auto SG43, so that makes it pretty pointless for the drug cartels to have.
…and the news reports say it was a SA43, not SG43, that was being smuggled across the border.
Pat
> the SA43 is the semi-auto version
Now that’s just sad.Kinda like a semi-auto Ma Deuce. Or a flintlock Minigun…
Yeah, they refer to it as a “rifle”.
Although the instruction book warns you to never try and fire it while holding it, but rather only when it’s attached to its mounting.
So what you’ve got is a rifle mounted on a wheeled mounting with a armor plate gun shield and belt feed for the ammo.
Just the thing for deer hunting, assuming you can drag the 90.5 pound monster into position.
And make sure you are wearing eye protection while looking at it.
Admin wrote:
“Now that’s just sad.Kinda like a semi-auto Ma Deuce. Or a flintlock Minigun…”
I used to own a six-barrel pepperbox percussion pistol which was interesting to load, as you were never quite sure you hadn’t loaded one barrel twice.
I finally engraved a ring around the steel ramrod that would be level with the end of the barrel when it had one ball in it.
Although it never happened to me, I’ve heard of cases where the shockwave of one barrel firing would travel through the steel of the barrel block, causing all the barrels to discharge near-simultaneously, which must have been quite a surprise from a recoil point of view.