Chi-Com Gun Control crackdown targets ethnic minorities

Chongqing authorities launched a televised crackdown on illegal firearms that involved 1,000 police officers and paramilitaries armed with bazookas. Security bureau officials said the campaign resulted in four underground arsenals and 10 weapon stores being destroyed, and the detention of dozens of suspects...In this remote mountainous region of Southwest China - where owning a powder shotgun was a tradition among the Miao ethnic people until 1996, when the central government introduced legislation banning the buying, selling and transporting of firearms without official permission - the market for guns is yet to disappear.  No official statistics are available on the number of privately owned firearms.
In 2007, a study by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies estimated the total number of guns held by civilians in China at 40 million, third only to the United States and India. Chinese analysts, however, say the figure is a wild exaggeration...Assembling a handmade Type 64 takes an experienced gunsmith only two to three days and costs around 300 yuan, yet several transactions by middlemen can push the sales price up to more than 10,000 yuan..."these gun traders make more money than we do in a month," joked a gun taskforce member who did not want to be identified.
For farmers, whose annual earnings are typically in the high hundreds, gun money can be a big boost... 
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Government censored report from China Daily
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Living under communist domination is bad enough, but when your traditional right to have arms, (and generate much needed income) is taken away by the government under threat of prison time, and is based on ethnic discrimination, life is even more oppressive and bitter. There is still a market for firearms despite heavy-handed police tactics (4 "arsenals" and 10 "weapons stores" needed 1,000 armed police? With "Bazookas"?. Mighty slim pickings for all that armed force...shades of BATFE). Unintended consequences include damage to the food chain by out of control animal and varmint populations damaging subsistence and commercial crops. Yet another failure of the communist/socialist mindset and the propaganda organs that support it - (S9)