US Gun Shops are Fueling Mexico’s Drug War

According to Mexico’s attorney general there were 12,456 murders in his country from January to November of 2010. That’s more than 1000 a month, mostly done with firearms, mostly dealing with drug trafficking. If you consider the killings for the last four years the total is more than 30,000.

Now, I get the whole “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” thing. It’s just that most of the killing is done by people with guns. What’s strange about this statistic from Mexico is that there is only one gun shop in all of Mexico. I’ll say that again: there’s only one gun shop in Mexico. It’s in Mexico City, run by the Mexican Army. Compare that to Houston, TX, where there are more than 300 gun shops.

We can draw buckets of conclusions from that well. I’ll give you three. Either no one is minding the Mexican Army gun shop; the profits from that shop could settle the Mexican foreign debt; or the guns used to kill 1000+ people a month are coming from somewhere else.

Let’s consider the last one. According to a story on NPR.org

“Since 2006, more than 60,000 of the weapons used in Mexican crimes have been traced back to the U.S.”

NPR’s Terry Gross interviewed Pulitzer Prize winning journalist James Grimaldi of the Washington Post about his investigation “The Hidden Life of Guns” which chronicles the US gun industry and the powerful gun lobby. Griamldi traced the firearms used in Mexican drug violence and listed the top 12 gun dealers where those guns were traced.

“Eight of the top 12 dealers are in Texas, three are in Arizona, and one is in California. In Texas, two of the four Houston area Carter’s Country stores are on the list, along with four gun retailers in the Rio Grande Valley at the southern tip of the state. There are 3,800 gun retailers in Texas.”

Most of those guns are bought by individuals, surrogate buyers, who cross their purchases into Mexico for the drug cartels. Grimaldi and his team did some heavy lifting to uncover this story.

Though the information used to be freely available to anyone who filed a Freedom of Information Act request, the 2003 Tiahrt Amendment passed by Congress prohibits the ATF from releasing gun tracing data.

The NRA made sure of that. What the Tiahrt Amendment doesn’t do, though, is stem the flow of guns into Mexico. And don’t hoard your hopes that the new congress will change that.

The Grimaldi interview is worth a listen.

How Thousands Of U.S. Guns Fuel Crime In Mexico