Donald Wants a Wall with Mexico, but Mexico Needs One!

As pernicious as the hard narcotics trade may be, as porous as our border may be to such illicit drugs, there is an equally fearsome American product that kills thousands and thousands of Mexicans every year, while rendering Mexican authorities powerless and particularly open to corruption. GUNS. Particularly semi-automatic assault rifles with large magazines and military grade ammunition.

You know which guns. Yeah, the ones you can buy in volume without any background check at guns shows in so much of the American Southwest. The ones with Latino gangland buyers waiting outside to purchase those weapons or from private sellers not required to secure a background check. Or from the 67,000 federally-licensed guns dealers in the United States with minimal requirements. Mexico has only one legal gun shop in the whole country, in the capital city, an army-run retailer known as the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales. More on how to get a gun legally in Mexico later.

There are hundreds of thousands of guns in Mexico, yet by most estimates there are probably under 10-20,000 legally-procured. “Each day the army gun store sells on average just 38 firearms to civilians, while an estimated 580 weapons are smuggled into Mexico from the United States.

“That paradox is increasingly relevant given Mexico’s unprecedented levels of gun violence, which have claimed more than 100,000 lives over the last decade. Last year was Mexico’s deadliest since the government began releasing homicide statistics in 1997. This year, the violence is on track to surpass that record.

“American firearms are directly driving the violence, although U.S. appetites for drugs and rampant corruption among Mexican officials also play a role. About 70% of guns recovered by Mexican law enforcement officials from 2011 to 2016 were originally purchased from legal gun dealers in the United States, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“Mexican leaders have long complained about the phenomenon. In 2012, then-President Felipe Calderon erected a giant billboard in the border city of Juarez that spelled out the phrase ‘No more weapons.’ The letters, formed using crushed firearms seized by authorities, were visible from Texas.” Los Angeles Times, May 29^th.  Has the United States done anything meaningful to stem this massive smuggling of weapons south? Not at all.

While gun ownership is a right across our southern border, Mexico shares an aversion to private gun ownership with most of the rest of the world. “Like the 2nd Amendment in the United States, Mexico’s Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms, but it also stipulates that federal law ‘will determine the cases, conditions, requirements and places’ of gun ownership. For many Mexicans, even those who love guns, the thought of an unfettered right to owning one is perplexing…

“[The permitting application process takes months and] would-be gun owners in Mexico must offer a birth certificate and proof that they are employed, and have no criminal record. The atmosphere at the directorate is more sterile than at a U.S. gun store or pawnshop. There are no moose heads on the wall and no promotional specials. Guns stamped with the army’s logo are kept in locked cases and customers aren’t given the chance to heft a rifle to their shoulder to see how it feels.

“Buyers spend hours shuffling between different counters to get their paperwork processed, waiting for long stretches under fluorescent lights in uncomfortable chairs. It feels a bit like the Department of Motor Vehicles, until one notices the no-nonsense army colonel running things and the machine-gun-toting soldiers patrolling the aisles.

“The store manager, Col. Eduardo Tellez, said he believes gun ownership is a privilege. He sees his job as making sure firearms end up in the hands of ‘moral and responsible’ people only.

“Current law allows citizens one handgun and up to nine rifles if they can prove they are members of shooting or hunting clubs. A separate permit that is difficult to obtain is required to carry the guns in public.” LA Times. Strange how self-righteous Americans are about people and drugs traveling north into the United States but how completely unwilling we are to do anything to stem the tide of massive arms smuggling south.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if we want our continuing flow of fresh semi-automatic weapons to a growing coterie of purely domestic terrorists here in the U.S., that may be our legal right… but we have no legal right to impose those weapons on a nation that clearly does not want those killing machines.