Amid all the fanfare and the genuine carnage in the increasingly violent war among and between Mexican drug cartels, there remains one dirty little secret.

While loudly trumpeting an unbridled right of citizens to bear arms north of the border, the National Rifle Association in this country is all but openly assisting the most violent of the violent Latin American drug cartels to get all the weapons they want.

The cartels use their high-powered weaponry to terrorize entire populations south of the border. But they also use their terror to keep their own membership and sub-contractors in line at all levels, with the result that while illegal narcotics operations within the United States are less openly bloody than across the Mexican border, they are all the more effective.

Meanwhile, the NRA uses its political muscle and its considerable largesse to oppose any effort to put a dent in domestic and international arms traffic through either law enforcement or regulation. Thus the Obama administration