Comment on a colleague’s work #2

Last blog assignment of the semester and my colleague Renee wrote an interesting and popular post  about how Texas should legalize medical and recreational use of Marijuana. She made very good points about the health benefits of Medical use of Marijuana such as how it doesn't have major side effects on the patients and how it is proving to actually help people.
     For recreational use Renee states in her blog that "In Colorado the legalization of marijuana has created thousands of new jobs. They have regulations for buying, selling, and possession. They have tax on both recreational and medical use, with a 10 percent additional special state tax on recreational use. This gave them a 135 million tax and fee revenue last year to put into other funds, such as education"
   Overall Renee provided a well written blog about how Texas could lean towards legalizing Marijuana and learn from Colorado and other states who have decided to legalize it.  As a state Texas can learn what will benefit us and make a system that fits into our standards that will make our state and the citizens who live in it happy.

Blog 7 Commentary #2

I came across this article on the Texas Tribune titled 
"While people and drugs come north, guns pour south into Mexico" 

The article focuses on how guns are flowing into both the U.S. and Mexico, but mainly guns are easier to come from the United States into Mexico.

Most of the guns range from hand cannons to rifles to military-grade weapons, but the preferred guns are long rifles including the semi-automatic varieties such as the AR-15 and AK-47, and " according to a 2016 GAO report. They are easily converted to fully automatic machine guns, the report notes."

The biggest gun distributors came from cities such as Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas.

"From 2009 to 2014, more than 73,600 guns seized in Mexico were from the United States, according to a 2016 report from the Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog over the federal government. More than 13,600 were confirmed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to have originated in Texas. But that figure could be higher — the report also states that because of factors like altered serial numbers on weapons and incomplete information on records, the states of origin could only be traced for about 45 percent of the U.S. total."

With this the U.S sending their guns and Mexico sending drugs there has been ...

"Illicit arms trafficking from Texas has for years contributed to the carnage in Mexico, where tens of thousands have died since a full-scale war between law enforcement and rival cartels began in 2005."

This article demonstrates how this vicious cycle has been never ending, and how our D.E.A. struggles on busting these criminals because most of these cases never lead to bigger cases, they are just given up on and smugglers are still in business until someone makes a mistake and a dent is actually made in stopping this "turf war" that's been going on.