Mexican drug cartels not getting THOSE through any 'gun show loophole'

For well over a year now, the forcible citizen disarmament lobby has tried to frame Mexican drug war violence as compelling justification for more restrictive gun laws in the U.S.  This has, in fact, become a preferred mode of attack on American citizens' Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human right to keep and bear arms.  Debunking this particular fictional justification for more restrictive gun laws has therefore become an increasingly important part of what gun rights advocates must do, and as such, something I have discussed frequently on these pages.

Most recently, we took a look at the claims of "80%" of Mexican "crime guns" coming from the U.S.--more specifically, and more accurately, we looked at the fact that the "80%" figure represents the proportion of firearms actually traced--which we then found out represents only about 30% of the guns seized.  Since then, correspondent Hank Martin kindly pointed me to some very valuable information that could shed some light on the reason such a low percentage of the guns are traced, and also explain the amount of firepower the drug traffickers have on hand.

The article is from late March of last year, in The Narcosphere (part of Narco News, an online journal about the "War on Drugs," and the erosion of freedom that is part and parcel of that "war"), and journalist Bill Conroy brings up some very interesting points in "Legal U.S. Arms Exports May Be Source of Narco Syndicates Rising Firepower."

To be sure, some criminal actors in the U.S. are smuggling small arms across the border. But the drug war in Mexico is not being fought with Saturday night specials, hobby rifles and hunting shotguns. The drug trafficking organizations are now in possession of high-powered munitions in vast quantities that can’t be explained by the gun-show loophole.

He is not the only person to make this observation.  In fact, the L.A. Times took a look at some of the same things, at around the same time.

Traffickers have escalated their arms race, acquiring military-grade weapons, including hand grenades, grenade launchers, armor-piercing munitions and antitank rockets with firepower far beyond the assault rifles and pistols that have dominated their arsenals.

Most of these weapons are being smuggled from Central American countries or by sea, eluding U.S. and Mexican monitors who are focused on the smuggling of semiauto- matic and conventional weapons purchased from dealers in the U.S. border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

In fact, even Mexican President Felipe Calderón himself, while chastising the U.S. for our "lax gun laws," seems (accidentally?) to have admitted that the drug syndicates are armed with weapons not available at any Texas gun shop or show--CBS News fills us in:

"We need to stop the flow of guns and weapons towards Mexico," President Calderon told AP. "Let me express to you that we've seized in this two years more than 25,000 weapons and guns, and more than 90 percent of them came from United States, and I'm talking from missiles [sic] launchers to machine guns and grenades."

Perhaps I've been attending the wrong gun shows, but missile launchers, machine guns, and grenades tend to be tough to come by at the one's I've been to.  So where is all this firepower coming from?  The L.A. Times article gives us one hint, mentioning that some of the weapons smuggled into Mexico over the Guatamalan border were provided by the U.S., as part of our foreign policy in Central America. 

That, of course, brings up yet another question: when we're told that, "(Such and such) percentage of weapons 'come from the U.S.,'" what percentage of those came not from the U.S. civilian gun market, but as part of State Department-approved foreign policy?  That takes us right back to the Narco News article:

The deadliest of the weapons now in the hands of criminal groups in Mexico, particularly along the U.S. border, by any reasonable standard of an analysis of the facts, appear to be getting into that nation through perfectly legal private-sector arms exports, measured in the billions of dollars, and sanctioned by our own State Department. These deadly trade commodities — grenade launchers, explosives and “assault” weapons —are then, in quantities that can fill warehouses, being corruptly transferred to drug trafficking organizations via their reach into the Mexican military and law enforcement agencies, the evidence indicates.

That article goes on to detail that perusal of Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) reports shows that from the years 2004 to 2007, the State Department authorized about $1 billion in defense hardware and services to Mexico, and more than three and a half times that to all of Latin America and the Carribean. 

Once this hardware is in Mexico, ostensibly in the hands of the government, and equipping it to fight the drug syndicates, it often instead arms them.  From Stratfor: