Sweet! I am a country boy cum suburbanite and I have a couple of pygmy goats as pets. That ought to get me an FFA license, no?

Kidding aside, you are spot on. Without passing a lengthy background check and other steps, including a federal tax, one cannot easily purchase automatic weapons in the US. Furthermore, thanks to the unconstitutional Hughes Amendment to FOPA, the prices for transferable automatic weapons are artificially hyper-inflated. Mexican drug gangs can buy automatic weapons far cheaper from every source but the heavily regulated US.

You would make a great truck broker (booking loads for the return trip), but the weapons that the cartels are using are not readily available in the US. They are far easier to acquire from the Mexican army deserters and the southern border.

First off, the weapons don't fuel the drug war. The excessively high black market profits of drug prohibition fuel the drug war. Firearms just happen to be among the tools used to wage the war. Any automatic weapons being used by Mexican drug cartels are not coming from the legal civilian firearms market in either the US or Mexico. Even the lying sad pandas over at the Brady Bunch & VPC know that. They just have no problem lying and exploiting the situation for their political and personal financial gain, however small it may be.

You aren't Paul Helmke, Dennis Henigan, or Josh Sugarmann, are you, Mr. Anonymous Coward? Because if you aren't any of the aforementioned Joyce Foundation sock puppets, I would expect you could manage to cease with the baseless accusations, and the flying off the handle, and the demonizing of an inanimate object, for just long enough to read some of the results of a simple Google search.

Then again, maybe you don't care about the truth. Maybe you just enjoy being part of the problem. Keep on agitating and lying. Thankfully most Americans are wise to your subterfuge.

Did the lights on your modem flicker when using RealPlayer for Linux?

They have one.

Eddie Davidson's family would disagree with you.

Furthermore, the increased costs in labor, bandwidth, storage and filtering technology to combat the actions of greedy, thieving spammers count as ruining lives in my book.

That claim is based on the flawed Kellermann study which has been repeatedly debunked.

There is far more anecdotal evidence that supports the validity of the defensive use of firearms by the armed citizen.

In Tennessee a landlord can override your 2nd Amendment rights, so what you suggest may not be that far fetched.

How would that be any different than unencrypted Skype for Linux?

Ever since upgrading to the recent Linux client, all I get is garbage out.

SST stickers for the kids? Cool!