The solution is obvious, its staring us in the face: Legalize the drugs.

Remove the profit motive and the crime goes away. This is a lesson we should have learned during Prohibition. Sure, some bootlegging and moonshining is still going on, but it is nickel and dime stuff, not a vast organized criminal enterprise threatening all of society. Some of your other remarks do lead to some troubling thoughts, though.

We are a nation awash in guns, and not just sporting and home defense arms, but weapons suitable for military use and optimized for urban combat. We already have a GI Joe wannabee population obsessed by the bang, bang, shoot, shoot, kill, kill mystique. Its an infantile fantasy obscured by all sorts of bogus constitutional arguments that has allied itself with a ruthless and souless conspiracy of arms merchants. The NRA isn't about sport or patriotism, its a corporate front and lobby for a very lucrative industry that feeds on puerile appetites, a teenage sexual obsession with firearms. It opposes even the most reasonable attempts at regulation or control because they are a threat to profits. Not all that different from a narcotics cartel, eh? These are the same guys that sold repeating rifles to the Indians, and moldy biscuit to the cavalry.

What's worse, guns are not just a disease that strikes individual criminals or terrified citizens desperate to protect themselves from them. It has become organized and militarized. We now have heavily armed criminal drug organizations, Mafias, racist white supremacists, right wing militias, motorcycle gangs, Klansmen and other paramilitary groups, all cloaking themselves under some phony constitutional rhetoric about alleged government tyrannies and UN and other black helicopter-type conspiracies. Look how quick they were to precipitate out of nothingness in the Bundy affair. These are NOT "well-regulated militias". They are armed gangs of thugs, no matter how many flags they wave in our face or what mealy-mouthed patriotic drivel they spout out their ass.

It is only a matter of time before other parts of the political spectrum start arming themselves and organizing in military fashion: citizens' posses, Black Panther-type movements, even neighborhood-type defense committees. Let's arm the Occupy Movement! Any form of civil unrest that breaks out, for any reason, even a natural disaster, will give these groups an excuse to come out ostensibly for self-defense, but eventually they will fight amongst themselves for supremacy. Setting up roadblocks, collecting tribute, enforcing justice. Just like in the Ukraine...or Nevada. "Show me your papers, citizen."

Ironically, in the end, they will all be pleading for some strong, armed outside force with some sort of governmental authority and real military discipline to step in, crush the militias and gangs, confiscate their weapons, and impose order at the point of a bayonet. After all, their property will be in danger, which is all these goons really care about. The same jack-booted statist tyranny they claim was their reason for arming in the first place will be the only institution capable of restoring order and imposing a harsh peace.

History will record it as the second American Civil War. No doubt it will be memorialized and romanticized just like the last pointless bloodbath was.