On the connecting flight from Houston to Monterrey I had a great time conversing with an American consultant; one of the things that worried me was when he started telling me about the security measures he was told to take to avoid getting kidnapped while doing business in Mexico. I felt real bad about my country’s inner affairs causing insecurity, so I apologized to him… but he told me that things wouldn’t be like this if it weren’t for the US’ huge drug demand.

After reading about gun smuggling, I watched The Boston Globe’s pictures from the drug war and, as I gazed at the collection of seized ammunition, I couldn’t help but question the current purpose of guns and ammo.

Seized ammunition is shown during a presentation of suspected members of the Pacifico drug cartel in Mexico city's airport on March 12, 2009. (REUTERS/Jorge Dan Lopez)

I’m pretty sure that, if you ask John Sigler he’ll conjure the ‘feeling of security’ card in order to defend the ‘noble right’ of carrying guns. Note: The ‘hunting’ card (otherwise known as the ‘way of life’ card) is nowadays seldom used since hunting is becoming more and more an old man’s ‘sport’. But security is relative: that feeling of security is — i’m willing to bet — directly proportional to how big a gun the person has.

Then I wondered if there are statistics about the purpose of ammunition… if it’s for hunting, or target-practice or warfare. Then I started Googling for more statistics and found out that the Czech’s Ministry of Interior publishes some stats about small arms held by permits or license in the Czech Republic and about related offences and crimes, but I couldn’t find one for the US or Mexico.

I finally concluded that there aren’t any ways, as of now, to estimate some advanced statistics about ammunition: Is there a way of determining how many people are hit after one thousand bullets are fired? How about the amount of animals hit? Is the first number larger than the second? I wanted some evidence to discard a hypothesis that had been unconsciously lurking in my mind: Statistically speaking, when the trigger gets pulled, is a person standing at the end of the barrel? If so, gun manufacturers should be more responsible about who their customers are.

Anyhow, Chris Rock sums it up pretty well:

I guess what I’ve been trying to say is: I am in favor of stricter gun & ammo control.

Me llamó mucho la atención el nuevo enfoque que tiene este programa, ya que es uno más dedicado a los mexicanos; al parecer busca erradicar mitos, sosegar sus preocupaciones y trae propuestas culturales muy interesantes a la mesa. Es un gran cambio de lo que solía ser antes. Escuchando que tenían un podcast, mi primer pensamiento fue suscribirme por Google Reader, pero para mi gran desilusión no cuentan aún con el componente DS-Syndicate en Joomla.

Tomando cartas en el asunto, utilicé un servicio gratis que se llama Feedity, y que utiliza una técnica llamada ‘HTML Scraping’ para generar RSS de una página de HTML. Me basé en una página que la Dirección General de Radio, Televisión y Cinematografía tiene por ahí en donde tienen un listado de los programas de la Hora Nacional. De ahí generé un feed que solamente tiene links a los archivos… después ese feed lo pasé por Yahoo Pipes, y utilizando un poco de magia de expresiones regulares logré añadirle fechas a las entradas. Finalmente, lo pasé a FeedBurner para difuminarlo por iTunes y Yahoo, y el resultado es El Feed de la Hora Nacional.

Fue un pequeño lío pero por fin tenemos una manera de agregar a Google Reader o bajar automáticamente con algún programa como RhythmBox los programas de la Hora Nacional.

P.D. Si no tienen idea de lo que son los ‘feeds’ o ‘RSS’, lean este tutorial de lo que es sindicación.