Mexican drug cartels do not need U.S. gun shops in order to arm themselves

       Photo Courtesy of Oleg Volk

The list of voices placing blame for the Mexican drug war carnage on "weak U.S. gun laws" seems to grow longer every day.  In February, it was  Attorney General Eric Holder:

As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons.

I think that will have a positive impact in Mexico, at a minimum.

Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY), in a letter to AG Holder, similarly said:

Our failure to enforce restrictions on imported assault weapons is affecting our bilateral relationship with Mexico," said Rep. Engel. "We must do more to support our friends in Mexico whose drug war is fueled by firearms flowing south from the United States, many of which should never have entered the US in the first place.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator John Kerry (D-MA) have more recently joined the chorus.  The Brady Campaign, the Violence Policy Center, and other citizen disarmament lobby groups are enthusiastically singing along.

Over and over again, we are fed some variation of the assertion that 90% (or even "95 to 100 percent") of the cartels' guns recovered by Mexican authorities are traced to the U.S.  Monday, my colleague, National Gun Rights Examiner David Codrea, provided some startling--and very instructive--context to that "90 %" figure.  Quoting Deputy Attorney General David Ogden, in his statement before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, in testimony for a hearing on the Mexican border threat, David reveals what is really meant by "90%." 

According to ATF’s Tracing Center, 90 percent of the firearms about which ATF receives information are traceable to the United States.

Not "90% of the total number of guns recovered from the cartels," but 90% of those that the Mexican government reports to the BATFE.

So how many is that?  According to Senator Kerry, not very many.

Only about one out of every four weapons seized by Mexican authorities last year was submitted to the ATF so they could be traced back to purchasers and sellers in the United States.

So in regard the other 75% of the weapons, the Mexican government--for whatever reason--is keeping the BATFE in the dark.  Could it be that the other 75% (or a large majority thereof) have not been sold in the U.S. civilian market, and that for that information to become known would undermine arguments to restrict U.S. gun rights--something Mexico has advocated for years?

There's also the issue of weapons that are clearly not entering Mexico from the U.S. civilian market--weapons like belt-fed machine guns, grenades, RPGs, and even mortars.  The Los Angeles Times recently raised that very point.

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.

The same article sheds an entirely new light on "from the U.S." (emphasis added):

These groups appear to be taking advantage of a robust global black market and porous borders, especially between Mexico and Guatemala. Some of the weapons are left over from the wars that the United States helped fight in Central America, U.S. officials said.

Sure--those weapons are "from the U.S.," but not from X-Caliber guns, in Phoenix, Arizona, and not from a gun show.

Mexican President Felipe Calderón himself has complained about weapons that are not legally available to American civilians.

 "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 launchers to machine guns and grenades."

Perhaps I'm just going to the wrong gun shows, but I'm having a devil of a time finding missile launchers--"weak U.S. gun laws" notwithstanding.

There is much the American public does not know about how the Mexican drug cartels are arming themselves, and that, I submit, is just how those who would further restrict the Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human right of the individual to keep and bear arms like it.  As the title of this article says, the Mexican drug cartels have no need for U.S. gun shops (or gun shows) to arm themselves--but law-abiding Americans do.  To the gun prohibitionists, that's enough incentive for more draconian gun laws, all by itself.