(KGW) PORTLAND, Ore. — A man and a woman were killed in a shooting at a Tualatin drug testing center Tuesday, according to Tualatin Police Department.

Police Chief Kent Baker said a man armed with a rifle entered the Legacy Metro Lab drug testing center at 7587 SW Mohawk St. and began firing.

A woman was killed. At least two others were injured. The suspect was later found dead from what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot, Baker said.

Baker could not say for certain how many people were in the drug testing center when the shooter opened fire.

The gunman’s motive was unknown. It was unclear what relationship, if any, he had with the lab or anyone there.

Oregon has some of the worst unemployment in the nation

Well, I have a theory. See if you can help me connect the dots:

• The US unemployment rate for September ‘09 was a seasonally-adjusted 9.8%
• The unemployment rate for Oregon was 11.5%
• The unemployment rate for the Portland metro area was 11.7%
• Oregon’s home foreclosure rate is the highest it’s been since the 1980s
• Failing a workplace drug test can mean the loss of your job.
• Losing your job can mean the loss of your home.

Sure, the fact that the shooting happened at a drug testing facility may be just coincidence.  Maybe he’s been dumped by a woman who works there.  Maybe he used to work there and got fired.  But I’ve got my money on “working man with long career loses job because of drug test, returns to exact his revenge.”

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SALEM, Ore. (AP) — The right of Oregonians to use marijuana for medical reasons and also to obtain concealed handgun permits is being challenged by local sheriffs who say federal law prevents those people from packing heat.

Advocates for the state’s medical marijuana law countered Wednesday in the Oregon Court of Appeals that the sheriffs simply don’t like the program and are looking for ways to undermine it.

Both sides now are looking to the courts to say definitively whether there’s anything to prevent Oregon from issuing the concealed handgun permits to users of medicinal pot.

Sheriffs from Washington and Jackson counties say, though, that they want clarification from the court on whether federal gun laws prohibiting illegal drug users from possessing handguns applies to people who have permits to use marijuana for medical reasons. Marijuana is still classified as a controlled substance under federal law, they said.

Lower courts had twice ordered the two sheriffs to give weapons permits to people who had lost them because they are medical marijuana users, and both appealed those rulings.

I hope the Oregon court takes some guidance from the California Supreme Court and US Supreme Court rulings on San Bernardino and San Diego counties’ suit over registry ID cards.  The California counties, headed up by law enforcement ideologues that hate their state’s medical marijuana law, thought they didn’t have to enforce the state law that required counties to make ID cards because the federal law says all pot is illegal.  Both the state and federal supreme courts deferred to earlier appellate judgments that state and local cops are charged with enforcing state and local law, not federal law.

By that reasoning, I’d assume county sheriffs in Oregon are bound to enforce state law, and since Oregon’s medical marijuana law says it is to be treated “like other medicines”, unless the sheriffs are pulling concealed handgun permits from Vicodin and Oxycontin users, they shouldn’t be pulling them from medical marijuana users.

Furthermore, since this state has no dispensary system, patients are forced to grow their own or store large quantities of medicine, making them prime targets for robbers and home invasions – disabled people with lots of weed in their homes are the very people the 2nd Amendment was enacted to protect!

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Yesterday I had written this in a post about Mexican officials seeking Asylum in the US:

How tragic – we fund the Mexican cartels because we prohibit a plant that Americans demand, then we supply 90% of the firearms and ammunition the cartels use to terrorize police, but when the police run to us in fear for their lives, we won’t grant them asylum.

Which got me a prompt email from Stasher Tom:

You stated that the US supplies 90% of the firearms to the Mexican cartels, this is not true.  The US at the most supplies 33% and as little as 14% of the firearms used by the cartels. Russ please retract this misstatement, please do not muddy this movement for liberty with unevaluated quotes from anti-gun groups.

And I thought, hold on, I’m usually really careful with the numbers.  Did I unknowingly slip up?  I don’t recall gathering quotes from the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence or any other “anti-gun” group.  I’m actually quite a fan of guns and the 2nd Amendment (it’s that Idaho DNA – where I’m from, “gun control” means “use both hands”), even though I think we do a poor job keeping them out of the hands of the violent and mentally ill and our culture has a huge defect revealed in our love for shooting each other (according to the CDC, the ratio of US gun homicides to International gun homicides is 15.7:1)

So what’s the truth and what led your intrepid reporter to the “90%” quote?  Read on…

Read the rest of this entry by clicking here

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The Times’ solution to the problem? Here it is: “There should be enormous shame on this side of the border that America’s addiction to drugs is bolstered by its feckless gun controls. Firm federal law is urgently needed if the homicidal cartels are to be seriously challenged as a threat to national security.”

So, there you have it. The violence in Mexico is all the fault of those American drug users and gun purveyors. If only Americans would just stop ingesting drugs and if only the feds would finally clamp down on guns (like they’ve done with drugs), all the problems would just go away.

via Hornberger’s Blog – Legalize Drugs Instead of Banning Guns

You’re kidding me. Drug law reformers and the gun rights advocates are together on legalizing drugs. Could the federal government possibly get itself backed into a worse corner with marijuana prohibition? I can’t wait to see who comes on board next to end this senseless War on Drugs …

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Examining the US-Mexico Gun Trade – International Business News – Portfolio.com
When Americans think about the border, they tend to picture undocumented workers or clandestine river crossings. They don’t think about war. But what’s happening in Mexico now is a war—no other word seems suitable—and the most gruesome battles are taking place within miles of the U.S.?So far this year, more than 1,350 people have been murdered in drug-trafficking-related crimes in Mexico. Last year, according to tallies kept by Mexican newspapers, 2,500 people died; since 2001, the number is close to 10,000—twice the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These killings have become such an everyday part of life that there’s a special word for them: narcoejecuciones, or narcoexecutions. The murdered include police, judges, prosecutors, soldiers, reporters, politicians, and innocent bystanders. Shootouts in broad daylight, mass executions, and public assassinations have become routine.

There are, in fact, two drug wars raging in Mexico. One is between drug-trafficking organizations—in particular, the Sinaloa cartel and its main rival, the Gulf cartel—over control of smuggling routes to the U.S.?The belligerence is easily understood, given the stakes. The U.S. government estimates that the cross-border drug trade was worth as much as $25 billion last year. According to Mexico’s attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, $10 billion worth of drug proceeds crosses from the U.S. into Mexico each year in the form of bulk cash.

The other war is between the government and the cartels. Mexican presidents have pledged to end trafficking before, but [President] Calderón, who took office in 2006, seems, in contrast to his predecessors, to be sincere, and his policies are having some effect. He has dispatched tens of thousands of troops, locked up hundreds of traffickers, and undertaken sweeping reforms of the police and judiciary. With each salvo, however, the violence intensifies. The wars aren’t just Mexico’s problem, either. The U.S., with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, consumes more than half of the world’s drugs; most of the marijuana and methamphetamine, much of the heroin, and 90 percent of the cocaine comes from or through Mexico. “U.S. consumers are already financing this war,” Medina Mora tells me, “only it’s on the wrong side.”

In late 2007, the Bush administration, which counts Calderón as one of its few friends in Latin America, announced the Mérida Initiative. If passed by Congress, it will provide Mexico with $1.4 billion in equipment and training over three years. But the initiative, with its unprecedented outlay of funds, is fraught with contradictions, since it would go to fight the flow of weapons coming in illegally from the U.S. More than 90 percent of the A.T.F.’s traces of guns seized in Mexico lead to the States. The Mexican ambassador recently estimated that 2,000 guns cross the border every day. Even if that figure is halved, it’s a trade worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

So prohibition of cannabis fuels the profit in trafficking marijuana across the border. With those profits, traffickers finance the flow of easily-purchased guns over the border. Our prohibitionary policies are funding the execution of innocent Mexicans and arming the executioners. Were it legal, Americans would buy, sell, and grow domestically and completely undercut the profits of these murderers as well as destroy much of their business. If Mexico followed suit their poor farmers could grow vast fields of industrial hemp or fine connoisseur cannabis, and some of those trafficking in the border drug war could turn into legit import/exporters.

But a prohibitionist will tell you the blood is on the hands of the US recreational marijuana smoker. Why, if only nobody smoked cannabis, nobody in Mexico would have to die! Because the prohibitionist sees the world in black and white and “Just say no” makes sense to him or her. The fact that humans used cannabis for thousands of years and will continue to use it despite all prohibitions doesn’t come up.  It’s evil and it must be eliminated, they think, and any idea of accepting evil in the name of harm reduction is unthinkable.

Besides, from a business point-of-view, unlimited funding for a project whose goal is to eliminate something that cannot be eliminated sounds like a pretty good profit-making venture for law enforcement, private prisons, and gun manufacturers.

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