This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 5th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

It's already known that Attorney General Eric Holder has some reservations about the right to keep him bare arms having supported

the DC gun ban and other firearms restrictions.

Now in hopes of stemming drug-related violence emerging from Mexico, Holder wants to prohibit so-called assault weapons.

Or as Cato Institute Legal Policy analyst David Ritgers calls them, semi-automatic weapons

with politically incorrect cosmetic features.

Attorney General Holder claims that a

reenactment of a quote assault weapons unquote ban would quote,

ban, would stem the violence in Mexico, the war between the drug cartels and the government.

And this is really a clearly misguided policy.

He's really worried about people with fully automatic

machine guns, rocket propelled grenades, high explosives, very dangerous devices that are heavily regulated

and have been since 1934, and civilians haven't been able to buy new ones since 1986.

And so this whole assault weapons policy is really just a misguided attempt to get at already regulated devices.

And the cartels have access to lots and lots of money because of our prohibitionist policies in the United States.

And because of this money, they can get these weapons, whether we have them legal or illegal or not.

And they'll have access to the black market to get fully automatic machine guns if they want them.

And another thing worth considering is the fact that in the hills of the tribal areas of Pakistan,

they make fully automatic AK-47s by hand.

The cartels have the resources and Mexico is a far more industrialized

country that if whatever policy we pursued, even if they were to make all guns illegal,

which they can't, but if they were to do that,

...