A story with a good guy and a bad guy
Ioan Grillo reports from Mexico City in an AP story:
Authorities are sounding the alarm about an influx of assault rifles, armor-piercing pistols and fragmentation grenades from the United States, weapons that they say are increasingly being used to kill police and soldiers fighting drug cartels…
Mexico has strict firearms laws, few gun stores and a mere 4,300 private licensed gun holders among its 105 million people. The United States, with nearly as many guns as people, has more than 100,000 licensed gun sellers, an industry that makes about 2.8 million small arms a year, and gun laws so loose that arms traffickers easily pick up any weapons they need.
Despite Mexico’s gun control laws, criminals have long smuggled guns in from the United States….99.4 percent of the weapons in the hands of Mexican criminals are suspected of coming from the United States.
At least 11,752 U.S.-sold guns have been found in Mexico since January 2003…one indicator of a new gun glut is the fact that hit men drop their guns at crime scenes rather than be caught with them afterward, knowing they are easily replaced
No doubt there are quite a few guns in Mexico that come from the US. But the whole tone of the piece sounds a bit breathless, as it ignores entirely a much larger migration going the other way, and probably contributing significantly to any southward arms traffic. As Grillo said in another context on CNN: “One of the things about Mexico, a lot of stories in Mexico, sometimes they do seem larger than life. They seem more fiction than fact.”
Not Scott Beauchamp quality perhaps, but what is?
August 20th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
The number of people owning arms must number in the hundreds of thousands regardless of Mexico’s gun laws. I lived in Mexico and just about every professional I met owned at least one gun.