Over the past year, we Real Americans were asked “Why do you neeeeeeed an ugly military-grade firearm?” – and before we could answer, were promptly told “You really don’t!”.

There are many answers, of course.  The best of them is “I’m a law-abiding citizen buying a legal product that will never be used to commit a crime of any kind, so it’s none of your business, and go piss up a rope”.  But “serving as the ultimate deterrent to government overreach” is right up there.

And somewhere down the list – for Americans – is this answer; deterring, and if necessary doing more, to the scumbags that prey on society’s honest and hard-working people

An audacious band of citizen militias battling a brutal drug cartel in the hills of central Mexico is becoming increasingly well-armed and coordinated in an attempt to end years of violence, extortion and humiliation.

What began as a few scattered self-defense groups has spread in recent months to dozens of towns across Michoacan, a volatile state gripped by the cultlike Knights Templar, a drug gang known for taxing locals on everything from cows to tortillas and executing those who do not comply.

Law enforcement – up to an including the Army – is of no use in protecting the citizen:

The army deployed to the area in May, but the soldiers are mostly manning checkpoints. Instead, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is facing the awkward fact that a group of scrappy locals appears to be chasing the gangsters away, something that federal security forces have not managed in a decade.

They include a 63-year-old pot-bellied farmer mindful that he can run only 30 yards; a skinny 23-year-old raised in Oregon who said he had never used a gun before; and a man who wears a metal bowl stuffed with newspaper as a helmet. A 47-year-old bureaucrat, who is sure that she will be killed if the gang retakes her town, said of her decision to join the cause: “I may live one year or 15, but I will live free.”

“Hey, you can’t fight an army…” – and the narcotrafricantes are surely an army, if only an army of thugs – “…with your deer rifle!”

Volunteer fighters who have been using old hunting rifles and even slingshots are increasingly armed with silver-plated AK-47s, armored trucks and other bounty that they said they have seized from the cartel. And although the self-defense groups had been operating independently, they are coalescing under the leadership of a tall, white-haired surgeon who once worked for the Red Cross in California.

Read the whole thing.

Mexico being what it is, of course, I fear that the socialist Nieto and his Army will get paid off by the narcos, and sooner or later turn on the plucky locals.

We certainly have to hope not.

Perhaps if our government would finance a “sting” operation to send American firearms to law-abiding citizens across the border…