Here’s a convergence between two “victimless” crimes that seem to produce scores of victims. The so-called “immigrant rights” advocates are nothing more than modern day slave masters advocating for the flooding of America with millions of vulnerable and desperate people who will be taken advantage of. Drug legalization advocates ignore both the inherent vileness of drug gangs and the fact that repealing prohibition didn’t make the mafia disappear. Both groups have no concern for the safety of people they help put in danger.

Here’s what happens when poor people are lured here by leftists and open border libertarians who could care less what happens to them while crossing the same desert the criminals they buy their drugs from lurk in:

Two female illegal immigrants from Guatemala said Thursday that they had been raped earlier this week by a group of armed drug smugglers.

The women, ages 18 and 28, were apprehended along with a group 38 earlier this week but didn’t tell anyone about the sexual assaults until Thursday morning while meeting with an assistant U.S. attorney in preparation for a deportation hearing, said Mario Escalante, Border Patrol Tucson Sector spokesman.

They gave the following account: A group of men dressed in black and carrying backpacks intercepted the group as they were walking through the desert on Monday night. The men pulled the two women aside and sexually assaulted them. One women said a man put a pistol to her head.

Officials notified the Guate-malan Consulate in Phoenix about the incident. The women were still set up for formal removal proceedings, Escalante said.

It’s the second report of women being raped by drug smugglers and third report of violence against women on the desert trails in the past week.

On May 4, three Mexican women, ages 16, 17 and 20, told agents that they had been raped by masked, armed bandits the day before.

On May 6, the Border Patrol encountered two Nicaraguan women, ages 41 and 36, near Milepost 20 on Arivaca Road who were visibly injured and dehydrated.

They said they had been badly beaten by a guide, or coyote, when they asked to slow down, Escalante said.

They were then left behind in the desert.

Let’s be clear. The gun that was held to these women’s head while they were raped, and kept their fellow travelers from intervening, was purchased with drug money. The money you give to people to buy your pot helps rape the illegals you pay slave wages to mow your lawn. That’s not what I call a victimless crime.

Repealing Prohibition won’t solve the problem either. As drug gangs lose their main revenue they’ll use the cache of weapons and funds to move into new territories. From the AZstar:

Drug-fueled home invasions, kidnappings and other violent crimes have surged in Tucson recently, echoing the drug war raging in northern Mexico.

As law enforcement cracks down on smuggling along the border, officials say, traffickers increasingly are turning to more desperate measures to continue their criminal activity.

In some cases, smuggling groups turn on each other, finding it easier to steal from competitors than bring drugs across the border themselves.

And although the violence is most likely to hit those engaged in drug-related activities, there’s always the risk that it will spill over and involve innocent people — a possibility that local law-enforcement agencies are scrambling to confront.

The violence is driven in part by the massive amount of drugs flowing through Arizona, officials say.

Although it’s one of four states along the U.S.-Mexico border, 60 percent of illegal drugs that end up in the country come through Arizona, said Tucson Police Department Capt. Terry Rozema, commander of the multiagency Counter Narcotics Alliance.

Drug trafficking always has been a brutal trade, but lately the violence is on the rise, officials say.

In response, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, now assisted by the U.S. Border Patrol, recently created two border-crime units that target human and drug smugglers in rural areas.

The growing threat in the city prompted the formation last month of a home-invasion unit, staffed with a sergeant, five detectives, a crime analyst and a clerk, said Sgt. Matt Ronstadt, the unit’s supervisor.

“The criminal element recognizes it’s probably easier to obtain a large quantity of narcotics or cash from someone who’s already done the hard work of shipping the product and finding a place to store it,” he said.

In other words, repeal prohibition and allow your local bodegas to sell weed and those bodegas will become death traps for everyone daring to cut into the cartel’s business.

But of course prohibition isn’t stopping the violence either. Mary Anastasia O’Grady has a great article in WSJ that talks about American demand for drugs destabilizing Mexico:

The upshot: Americans underwrite Mexico’s vicious organized crime syndicates. The gringos get their drugs and the Mexican mafia gets weapons, technology and the means to buy off or intimidate anyone who gets in their way. Caught in the middle is a poor country striving to develop sound institutions for law enforcement.

The trouble for Mexico is that, even if it understands that U.S. demand is not going away, it cannot afford to cede large swaths of the country to the drug cartels. Thus Mexican President Felipe Calderón has made confronting organized crime a priority since taking office in December 2006. His attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, told me in February that the goal is to reclaim the state’s authority where it has been lost to the mafias.

But after 17 months of engagement, while San Diego students party on, victory remains elusive and the Mexican death toll is mounting. Most of the drug-related killings since Mr. Calderón took office seem to be a result of battles between rival cartels. Still, the escalating violence is troubling. The official death toll attributable to organized crime since the Calderón crackdown began now stands at 3,995. Of that, 1,170 have died this year.

Especially alarming are the number of assassinations among military personnel and municipal, state and federal police officers. The total is 439 for the 17 months and 109 so far this year. Many of these victims have been ordinary police officers whose refusal to be bought off or back off cost them their lives.

But as the murder of police chief Millan makes clear, high rank offers no safety. Two weeks before he was gunned down, Roberto Velasco, the head of the organized crime division of the federal police, was shot in the head. The assailants took his car, which leaves open the possibility that it was a random event, but most Mexicans are not buying that theory. Eleven federal law enforcement agents have been killed in ambushes and executions in the last four weeks alone.

If U.S. law enforcement agencies were losing their finest at such a rate, you can bet Americans would give greater thought to the violence generated by high demand and prohibition. Our friends in Mexico deserve equal consideration.

The only real solution would be for Americans to stop buying so much pot, to boycott the cartels the way we boycott companies whose policies we don’t like. But Americans are spoiled and used to receiving their instant gratification and college aged kids will no more give up getting high to save some Mexican lives than they are likely to not have unprotected sex to avoid catching AIDS. Pot smokers will continue funding the destruction of Mexico, and when the cross border violence becomes intolerable they’ll demand action from the government.

But when we demand action from them, the people that fund the cartels, they’ll always fall back on the “it’s a victimless crime” argument.

Really.

Apparently a few states are reacting to some high profile incidents in which convicted sex offenders were found driving ice cream trucks. In one case a man named Eduardo Grau ended up molesting a 9-year-old girl while using his ice cream truck as a rolling child lure. To prevent such crimes in the future people are attempting to use common sense and keep pedophiles and rapists from working in what is essentially a child service industry. The A.C.L.U. is not on-board:

Efforts to keep predators out of ice cream trucks gained momentum in 2004, when Eduardo Grau of Troy, N.Y., 56, was arrested after police said he offered rides in his ice cream truck to children and abused a 9-year-old girl.

The case spurred the 2005 New York state law. Grau eventually pleaded guilty to first-degree sexual abuse in 2006, according to District Attorney Patricia DeAngelis. Since then, cities including San Antonio and Tucson have passed similar measures. New York appears to have the only statewide restriction, said Sarah Hammond of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Florida Assistant State Attorney Harmon Massey prosecuted a 2005 case involving the driver of an ice cream truck who was eventually convicted of battery against a teenager.

Massey said Florida should consider an ice cream vendor law. “Can you think of a better kid magnet, if you were a sex offender?”

Amanda Burnham of Perris, Calif., said that for a sex offender, “there are a bazillion things you could do for a living that don’t involve children. It just seems like a very, very odd choice.”

Burnham learned last summer that a man who drove an ice cream truck down her street is a registered sex offender. She and her neighbors put notices “on every single house” to warn residents, she said. The effort helped inspire the proposal in San Bernardino County.

Such laws can go too far, said Jennifer Ring, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the Dakotas.

“If you’re throwing everyone in the same bucket, you’re really restricting these people who have paid their debt to society to go on and be productive citizens,” Ring said.

Is anyone really surprised by this?

h/t Crime Scene KC.

Andrew Malcolm was displaying some wishful thinking on his blog, or perhaps channeling his inner Paulnut, when he wrote this piece which implies that Paul’s cult of Communist/Libertarian/Pacifist/Minute Men would be embarrassing anyone but themselves at the R.N.C. convention with an attempt to hijack the G.O.P. and turn it into a less coherent version of the Libertarian Party:

But in the meantime, quietly, largely under the radar of most people the forces of Rep. Ron Paul and his libertarian-minded GOP backers are collecting delegates at the local level and planning a revolt against Sen. John McCain at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in September

Paul’s presidential candidacy has been correctly dismissed all along in terms of winning the nomination. He was even excluded as irrelevant by Fox News from a nationally-televised GOP debate in New Hampshire.

But what’s been largely overlooked is Paul’s candidacy as a reflection of a powerful lingering dissatisfaction with the Arizona senator among the party’s most conservative conservatives. As anticipated a month ago in The Ticket, that situation could be exacerbated by today’s expected announcement from former Republican Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia for the Libertarian Party’s presidential nod, a slot held by Paul in 1988.

Nevermind Ralph Nader, Republican and Democratic parties both face….

…potentially damaging internal splits that could cripple their chances for victory in a narrow vote on Nov. 4.

Just take a look at recent Republican primary results, largely overlooked because McCain locked up the necessary 1,191 delegates long ago. In Indiana, McCain got 77% of the recent Republican primary vote, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, who’ve each long ago quit and endorsed McCain, still got 10% and 5% respectively, while Paul took 8%.

On the same May 6 in North Carolina, McCain received less than three-quarters of Republican votes (74%), while Huckabee got 12%, Paul 7% and Alan Keyes and No Preference took a total of 7%.

Pennsylvania was even slightly worse for the GOP’s presumptive nominee, who got only 73% to a combined 27% for Paul (16%) and Huckabee (11%).

Paul did reasonably well in one state where if it was two person race he still would have been trounced, in other primaries his best showing is to average 7% (including Libertarians and “independents” who registered to vote for him) and he and his cult are going to embarrass the G.O.P. establishment?

It’s they who should be embarrassed, not given more credit than they deserve. Alan Keyes has run a much more successful campaign to challenge Republicans to examine their values and he did it without getting the morons from Digg to donate all their money to him. What Ron Paul has done is cobbled together a coalition of fringe groups from all parts of the political spectrum, including neo-Nazis and Anarchists, and milked those suckers for all they’re worth.

Malcolm goes on to lay out the movie villain-like aspirations Paul has for his army of pot-smoking web nerds:

They hope to demonstrate their disagreements with McCain vocally at the convention through platform fights and an attempt to get Paul a prominent speaking slot. Paul, who’s running unopposed in his home Texas district for an 11th House term, still has some $5 million in war funds and has instructed his followers that their struggle is not about a single election, but a longterm revolution for control of the Republican Party.

Who wouldn’t want a party controlled by rape loving racists, sex tourists, gangs of stalkers, Communists pretending to be Libertarians, Islamists pretending to be Libertarians and of course Andrew Sullivan.

At Hot Air Allahpundit puts the Ron Paul “revolution” in focus for those duped by the small but vocal Paulites:

One look at the delegate count should make the scope of the nascent revolution clear. Paul has won all of 26 delegates. Even if he wangled a few dozen more through manipulations in caucus states like Nevada, at best he’ll come up with 100 delegates in a 2,200-delegate convention. That’s not a revolution, it’s a lunatic fringe.

Hey, if you’re a Libertarian that’s fine. Vote Libertarian. But Ron Paul has hooked you marks into helping him with his doomed plan to seize control of the G.O.P. and become the Conservative version of Lyndon Larouche.

Paul will never convince Republicans that Isolationism and rolling back the military will make us safe. Isolationism didn’t keep us safe from a militarized Japan in WW II and it won’t keep us safe from Militarized communist and Islamist regimes who are even now dreaming of rolling their tanks into Times Square. And thankfully the “revolution” will never convince Republicans or the rest of America that our best defense is to rely on fighting spirit of effeminate, immature drug abusers, sorry I meant Libertarians, to turn back the tide of an invading army.

7% of people on the right (and it this case that number includes people so far left they just seem to be on the right) agree with Paul’s fevered fantasy of a new revolution. I think I speak for the other 93% when I say count us out.

From the Arizona Daily Star:

U.S. Border Patrol agents were involved in two violent incidents with drug smugglers Wednesday and Thursday in downtown Nogales.

On Wednesday night at 10 p.m. east of the Dennis DeConcini port of entry, agents using a remote video surveillance system — a stand-alone 60-foot pole that holds four cameras — spotted three people carrying bundles, said Mike Scioli, Border Patrol Tucson Sector spokesman.
They lost sight of the trio as they made their way into a housing development butshortly after, spotted a sport utility vehicle leaving the area.

Agents tried to stop the black Ford Explorer as it headed south toward Mexico at high speeds. The vehicle came to a stop near the border and agents saw a a the driver get out and jump over the fence into Mexico, Scioli said.

Then, agents heard a yell followed by a volley of gunfire from Mexico. Agents took cover and were unable to identify the gunmen or if they shots were aimed at them, he said..
They called Mexican authorities who responded to the area but didn’t find the gunmen. Agents found three bundles of marijuana inside the sport utility vehicle weighing 158 pounds, Scioli said.

A few hours later, at 1 a.m. Thursday, camera operators spotted three men climbing the border fence at Short Street east of the Dennis Deconcini port of entry, he said. An agent driving an armored Border Patrol vehicle known as a “war wagon” responded to the area and was peppered by rocks from south of the line. He countered by using his pepper ball launcher to saturate the area, Scioli said.

The article goes on to relate the number of violent assaults on American Border Patrol agents since October 1st is 132. We don’t pay them enough.

This comes on the heels of an incident where Border Patrol had to fire at a truck barreling down on them to keep from being run down.

Up to 600 Black and Latino students were involved in racially tinged violence at the Locke High School in South Los Angeles. The riot was described as the worst violence many of the faculty had ever seen in a high school plagued with violence and what the L.A. authorities are euphemistically calling “tagging crews.” It took 60 officers, some in riot gear, to restore order and only four arrests were made. One of the arrested was a non-student carrying a knife.

From The L.A. Times:

A fight between rival groups of black and Latino students at Locke High School quickly escalated into a campus-wide melee Friday, with as many as 600 students brawling until police restored calm with billy clubs.

The troubled campus in South Los Angeles was locked down after the fight broke out at 12:55 p.m., as students returned from lunch to their fifth-period classes. Overwhelmed school officials called Los Angeles police for help, but students and faculty said it took about half an hour before dozens of officers, many in riot gear, restored order.

“The kids were crazy, running from place to place, jumping on other kids,” said Reggie Smith, the school’s band director, who said he ran to pull his students from the melee. “Some of my kids were crying because they were walking to class with friends and they got jumped.”

Los Angeles Unified School District police said that there are only two officers assigned to Locke but that the school police force brought in about 60 officers after receiving word of the brawl. The Los Angeles Police Department also dispatched more than a dozen patrol cars and about 50 officers.

Susan Cox, an LAUSD spokeswoman, said police arrested four people — three students for fighting and one non-student for illegal possession of a knife. Four students were treated in the school nurse’s office for minor injuries.

The campus at 111th and San Pedro streets has long been one of the city’s most troubled. This school year has been particularly difficult, with near-daily fights — albeit on a much smaller scale — during much of the fall and winter. Locke is about to be reorganized as a cluster of charter schools run by Green Dot Public Schools, which will take over in July, and some faculty and staff have accused the district of letting the campus drift in its final year as a traditional public school.

“Morale has really dropped because they don’t feel like they have everybody behind them,” cheerleading coach Marlo Jenkins said recently. “There are just fights upon fights upon fights now.”

Not the kind of leadership needed in areas where the growing tensions between Blacks and Latinos is creating a culture of racist warfare. Locke High School is 65% Latino and 35% black, and though many students say there isn’t much open hostility the people interviewed in the article admit to both self-segregation of the groups and near constant “black on brown” fights. The actions of the police after restoring order should tell you how bad the situation really is in Los Angeles despite the rosy picture many try to paint regarding race relations:

After securing order, authorities rounded up the students who hadn’t returned to class and segregated them by race, holding Latinos in the boys gym and African American students in Hobbs Hall, the school’s multipurpose room.

Beginning at 2 p.m., school officials began releasing students in small groups to go home. The school remained on lockdown until the last group had left about 3:15 p.m.

LAUSD’s Cox said that there would be an enhanced police presence at Locke during school hours next week and that the district would send human relations staff to the school to talk to students.

In recent years, melees have broken out periodically at many campuses with a black and Latino presence, including in Los Angeles, Lynwood and Compton. There have been fights between Latinos and Armenians in other areas that led to campus lockdowns.

Soon we’ll end up with segregated schools. The Latino vs. Armenian violence mentioned is a problem that has been going on since the 90s apparently, with a gang called Armenian Power forming up specifically to protect Armenians from Latino gang violence. A.P. is small but extremely violent and have fought MS-13 on occasion. In ‘05 there was a riot in Grant High School involving Latinos and Armenians.

If the youth in Los Angeles is any indication then race relations in America are getting much worse. The fact that authorities can barely control the groups involved make America’s future look bleak indeed.

There’s a video report from the local ABC affiliate. Breitbart has a nuts and bolts report.