How America Is Exporting Gun Violence to Mexico

JUNE 14, 2018

A failed drug war and lax U.S. gun regulations spell out disaster for Mexico.

BY LAURA WEISS

On May 18, the country awoke to news of yet another school shooting. This one occurred in Santa Fe, Texas, a small town outside of Houston. A 17-year-old shooter killed 10 high school students with his father’s gun, just months after 17 students were killed at Parkland High School. The recent shootings have rekindled a national conversation about the disproportionate levels of gun violence in the United States and the lax laws regulating gun purchase and use.

Yet missing from the mainstream conversation is an examination of how the U.S. government’s gun policies exacerbate violence in neighboring countries, particularly Mexico. Some 70 percent of guns recovered in Mexico in the last five years originated in the United States. Some of these guns come from the legal transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars in guns to Mexican police and military forces, which often wind up in the hands of criminal organizations, fueling violence. Guns also come from illegal gun trafficking facilitated by easy purchasing requirements, as well as lax regulations and documentation.

Tracing the bullets

In 2017, Mexico had the highest homicide rate since the peak of its drug war in 2011, with nearly 30,000 people murdered. Some 70 percent of guns recovered in Mexico between 2011 and 2016 originated in the United States. According to a new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP), the proportion of murders in Mexico committed with firearms has skyrocketed in the last two decades: In 1997, 15 percent of Mexico’s homicides were committed with a gun, whereas by 2017, this number had jumped to 66 percent.

“Gun regulations in the United States are clearly associated to violence in Mexico and in other countries,” Eugenio Weigend Vargas, co-author of the CAP report, told In These Times. Weigend Vargas pointed to a number of factors leading to this rise in gun violence in Mexico—in particular, the end of the U.S. government’s federal ban on assault weapons in 2004. A 2013 study found that homicides, gun-related homicides and crime gun seizures in Mexican border states rose between 2004 and 2013, with the exception of Mexican states bordering California, which retained its assault weapons ban.

More:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21213/mexico-arms-transfers-regulations-documentation-donald-trump/