“Three Stoned Gentlemen from Miami Beach Becomes the Most Hated Gunsmen in America” is an interesting little tale of arms and the dudes who used them. It’s a fun little book to read about guns and what men do to get them. I thought it was a good little story, although at times I felt the description of the exotic weaponry a little too much like describing a particularly exotic fruit. Still, I liked it. The guys were definitely gunsmen, and they had guns, so it didn’t matter.
The story begins in 1988: when the guys are in some sort of bar and they pick up a girl. They have a few joints, go to a friend’s house and smoke a lot. It turns out the friend is a dealer; he’s very rich and he has all sorts of cool hardware. It’s unclear what, exactly, he’s dealing with, but he puts some pot in their car and offers them marijuana. At some point in the story, the girls get into the car and they discover that the drugs had been switched from pot to crack.
Back in the old days, arms weren’t sold through private contractors: There were arms brokering companies in California and Arizona, but no one really sent arms to Iraq. This is because the United States doesn’t like Iran shipping weapons to international terrorist organizations, as some of those arms end up in the hands of these groups. Private contractors did sell arms and ammo to theussasions, however, and they did so by purchasing from businessmen in Saddam’s army.
There are two ways for this to have happened: Either the arms were procured through legitimate government contracts, or the US government was trying to buy some of the arms. One of the most interesting things about the story is that Private Contractors prefer to do business with people in Saddam’s army. They don’t like the fact that the UN is looking into whether or not they have been doing business with the insurgents. The Iraqi resistance also has connections to the resistance group al Qaeda, and they’re fighting against the Americans in Iraq, so the eforts of the Iraqi govt. have allowed them to purchase some of the arms they need, like anti-tank rocket propelled grenades and RPG armored personnel carriers.
Private contractors aren’t the only ones: who are buying up arms in Afghanistan. Right now, the US military is also rearming itself. Although there’s no word on whether they’re getting Chinese AK-47’s (presumed faulty and therefore illegal in the eyes of the Chinese government), they’re rearming themselves with Chinese made AK-47’s.
So, what exactly is going on here? We don’t know the names of the companies involved, nor do we have a name for the arms dealer that’s funneling money from China to the Afghan insurgents.
If you have any information on this, a quick search of the internet should turn up some results. Nevertheless, this is a developing story. Stay tuned.