U.S. Gun Laws Fuel Mexican Drug Wars
By Juliet A. Leftwich | Legal director of the Legal Community Against Violence
(This article originally appeared on www.CalLaw.com)
Anyone who needs convincing that our nation’s gun laws are dangerously inadequate should consider the devastating impact those laws are having on our neighbor to the south, Mexico. Firearm-related violence across the border has skyrocketed recently in bloody battles between Mexican drug cartels and Mexican authorities, resulting in the slaughter of police officers, soldiers, judges, prosecutors, reporters and innocent bystanders. Because Mexico’s strict gun laws make it extremely difficult for civilians to purchase firearms, the increasing gun violence raises an obvious question: Where are the drug cartels buying their guns? Unfortunately, they’re buying them right here in the United States.
According to a report issued by the U.S. State Department on Feb. 27, more than 5,000 people were killed in the Mexican drug wars in 2008. The report states that Mexican authorities seized nearly 40,000 illegal firearms in 2008 and that 95 percent of the guns traced were purchased in the United States. Not surprisingly, the escalating violence has begun to spill over into this country.
The reason Mexican drug lords look to America for their guns is clear: In most states they can easily buy guns, including assault weapons and .50-caliber rifles, from private sellers without a background check, no questions asked.
Gun sales in Mexico, in contrast, are strictly regulated, as they are in other industrialized nations outside of the United States. The reason shady gun dealers and private sellers here are willing to supply the illegal Mexican market is also clear: It is a highly lucrative business and our gun laws make it unlikely that they will ever get caught.
Three changes to our federal firearms laws would help dramatically stem the flow of illegal guns, both in Mexico and here at home.
The first would be to close the “private sale loophole,” which allows unlicensed persons to sell guns without conducting a background check on the purchaser. Under existing federal law, background check and other record-keeping requirements are only imposed upon licensed firearms dealers. However, undocumented sales by unlicensed persons — which can legally occur at gun shows or any other location — account for an estimated 40 percent of all gun sales. Because ofthis massive loophole, criminals and other prohibited persons can easily buy guns throughout most of the United States (only California and Rhode Island require background checks on all gun purchasers). It should surprise no one, therefore, that Mexican drug gangs have seized upon this loophole to funnel guns into Mexico.
The bloodshed in Mexico and America could also be curtailed if Congress banned assault weapons and .50-caliber rifles (rifles used by armed forces worldwide that combine long range, accuracy and massive power). Congress enacted an assault weapon ban in 1994, but allowed that law to expire in 2004. Now only seven states, including California, ban assault weapons, and California is the only state to ban .50-caliber rifles. As a result of this regulatory vacuum, assault weapons and .50-caliber rifles are proliferating on the domestic market. They are also being purchased in the United States and smuggled across the border for use by the drug cartels, ever eager to increase their firepower over Mexican authorities. During a recent press conference in Phoenix focused on combating drug cartels in Mexico, Attorney General Eric Holder linked the proliferation of military-style weapons to the violence along the Mexican border, noting that a federal assault weapon ban would have a positive impact.
Finally, Congress could significantly reduce gun violence, both domestically and in Mexico, if it strengthened regulation and oversight of firearms dealers by repealing the so-called Tiahrt Amendments, annual riders to the U.S. Department of Justice’s appropriations bill which significantly hinder law enforcement’s ability to prosecute corrupt dealers and other criminals.
According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, firearms dealers are a major source of trafficked firearms here and in Mexico. Trafficked guns are frequently sold by a dealer to a “straw purchaser,” a person with a clean criminal record who purchases a gun on behalf of a convicted felon or other prohibited person, often in a manner that would be obvious to any dealer who is paying attention. Business is booming for dealers who have set up shop along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border, where more than 6,600 dealers now sell their wares.
Law enforcement efforts to prosecute dealers engaged in gun trafficking are significantly hampered by the Tiahrt Amendments, which: 1) prohibit ATF from releasing gun trace data, used to determine where a crime gun was purchased and historically shared by law enforcement agencies to detect patterns of criminal behavior; 2) require the destruction of approved gun purchaser records within 24 hours (records of handgun purchases in California, in contrast, are never destroyed, facilitating efficient crime gun tracing); and 3) prohibit ATF from requiring gun dealers to submit inventories, allowing unscrupulous dealers to claim that they simply “lost” guns that are later recovered in crime. These amendments, added to appropriations bills since 2003 at the behest of the gun lobby, have tied the hands of law enforcement seeking to prosecute gun dealers who supply the illegal market.
Public opinion polls consistently show overwhelming support for common-sense reforms to our nation’s gun laws. According to three of those polls, 92 percent of respondents favor mandatory criminal background checks for all gun purchasers; 65 percent favor banning assault weapons; 90 percent believe police should be allowed to share information about purchasers and sellers of crime guns; and 86 percent favor requiring dealers to conduct annual inventories.
Although President Obama has also expressed support for strengthening background checks, banning assault weapons and repealing the Tiahrt trace data restrictions, his fellow Democrats have shown little appetite for a fight with the National Rifle Association, despite the fact that our nation’s weak gun laws are directly contributing to the senseless bloodshed in Mexico and at home. How much longer are members of
Congress going to ignore the will of the American people and continue their shameless pandering to the gun lobby? Probably for as long as we continue to let them.
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Reprinted with permission from the March 13, 2009 edition of The Recorder. © Copyright 2009. Incisive Media US Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission is prohibited.
For information, call 749.5410 or Paula.Ryplewski@incisivemedia.com. ALM is now Incisive Media, www.incisivemedia.com
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I will keep my comments short.
1. See the LA Times story about drug cartels importing military weapons from central america. This is where they are geting their military hardware, not from us.
2. Fully automatic firearms (i.e. machine guns ) are controled by the National Firearms Act of of 1934. You can leagally own a machine gun in this country, just pay a $200 tax , fill out the proper forms, submit those forms with your finger prints to the ATF, get permission from your local sheriff, make certain it is not illeagal in your specific state, and in 6 months if all goes well you can buy the gun as long as it was made before 1986.
3. Reagan signed the weapons ban in 1986 prohibiting civilians from buying machine guns that were made after May 1986. This drove the price of an M-16 from $700 to over $6000.
4. Contrary to media reports, you cannot buy hand grenades, or RPG's at a gunshow.
5. If drug cartels are getting RPG's and handgrenades, why not get machineguns from the same supplier instead of buying semi-automatic weapons from the US civilian market?
6. The 1994 "Assaut Weapons Ban" is a JOKE. It only banned future sales of semi-automatic weapons that had a flash supressor, bayonet lug or colapsable stock. So, the manufacturers just removed those features and kept selling the guns. I have one of those guns sitting in my safe right now. If you would like a photo of it, let me know.
6. If the "Assault Weapons Ban" of 1994 was so effective, why did only 7 states enact their own version of the law?
7. For the past 20 years, gun dealers have been required to inform the ATF of anyone buying more than one handgun at a time. The ATF knows who these buyers are and where they live, but have never done anything about it.
8. Ever since Obama was elected, the gun buying has been out of control. It is very difficult just to find a semi-auto rifle buy, let alone to buy large numbers of them.
9. 50 caliber rifles weigh over 20 lbs and are around 5' long, and have a starting price around $1300 for a single shot rifle. A semi-automatic version will set you back $8000. No one is going to use one to hold up a gas station.
10. If California has such wonderful gun laws, why is their crime rate so high comparatively?
11. I would not trust anything coming from the Mexican government. Given their long history of corruption, I have no doubt they would exploit this drug war to cover their own corruption and to get more money from the US.
12. When the Mexican government turns over the serial number of all the guns they recover, and not just a select few, then I'll believe them.
13. Rifles as a whole are far down on the list of murder weapons used in this counry according to the FBI. More people are beaten to death than are shot with a rifle.
14. Anyone reading this, please feel free to use the internet to check my comments. But use unbiased sources.
This article is just a repeat of the standard talking points of the gun control (ban) lobby. I would love to address each point, however, time constraints do not allow that luxury. Why is it that you constantly exclude the crime deterrent effect that a free society has in defending itself? Let me give you an example: Two cities face each other across from the U.S. - Mexican border. In one of them, oppressive gun control restricts legal firearm ownership to an elite few approved by the bureaucrats in power . In the other city, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is respected by the constitutions of the nation and the state. Which city - Juarez, Mexico, or El Paso, Texas - resembles a war zone? Juarez had more than 1,500 murders in 2008. That's a homicide rate of more than 100 per 100,000. Just across the border, El Paso's population of 600,000 had just 16 murders in 2008. Gun control advocates like yourself claim that if only we'd pass "common sense" gun control laws like they have in Juarez, our streets would be safer! Mexico's gun control laws haven't stopped the drug cartels from turning Juarez into a killing zone. Meanwhile, thousands of El Paso's citizens are Right-to-Carry permit holders, and El Paso is one of the safest cities in the nation. The same comparison can be made of any two cities in the U.S. as well. The cities with the highest restrictions on gun ownership (Chicago-Washington DC) are the same cities with the highest rates of violent crime. Your endless spinning of this subject can't erase the fact that criminals prefer the safe work environment that you advocate. As a Federal Law Enforcement Officer, I can tell you that the more ability an individual, community, or state has to defend itself, the less crime they will experience.