North America’s Most Violent Criminals’ Best Friend – US Gun Laws

A tiny fraction of US guns seized in Mexico, destined for destruction

North America’s Most Violent Criminals’ Best Friend – US Gun Laws

Canada and Mexico Should Build a Wall!

Republicans are demanding, with one hand, that we stop those masses (on and off) at our border from pressing for asylum – especially those who claim domination by well-armed cartels in their homelands – and that we construct strict border controls and a long wall to do that… but with the other hand, doing everything in their power to allow easy access to all sorts of guns here, even those AR-15-style assault weapons (there are over 30 million of them in the US alone), with very few enforced limits on who can buy them. It does seem that US border enforcement is mostly about drugs and immigrants on our Mexican border… heading north. But when it comes to smuggled weapons heading south to those cartels, not so much.

It actually may be too late to add common sense to the flow of American firearms into Mexico, Central and South America. Those guns are already there by the thousands, if not millions: there are way too many billionaire cartels who have bought enough local politicians and developed a profoundly solid drug-smuggling infrastructure that almost guarantees that US Border and Customs officers have little or no shot at stemming the push of drugs into the United States.

Attempting to put a border wall in place just gives those cartels justification to raise drug prices, knowing that getting drugs into the US has grown into a sophisticated set of operations designed by engineers and transportation experts who have never been deterred by operationally overwhelmed drug enforcement agents in the US. Oh, and higher drug prices for addicts in the US lead to increased homelessness and criminality on our side of the border. Good work, “law and order” Republicans. Just think how different the drug cartels would be if they just did not have all those American-made firearms! US gunmakers know what’s happening… and love it!

Mexico has very strict gun laws, even as they have a more logical constitutional equivalent of our wildly misinterpreted Second Amendment. There are only two gun stores in Mexico, both governmental agencies, and buying a legal firearm requires passing a battery of psychological tests, a deep background check, and proof of proficiency in the use and safety of firearms… the process can take more than a year and gun permit renewals are equally rigorous. Or, as Nick Penzenstadler, writing for the May 22nd USA Today and presenting only the tip of the iceberg, tells us, based on hacked data leaked to the press, Mexicans can just select from a vast illegal array of firearms available everywhere:

“A massive leak of Mexican military intelligence has exposed for the first time in two decades U.S. gun shops and smugglers tied to 78,000 firearms recovered south of the border – and which types of guns are being trafficked.

The nuggets of information are among roughly 10 million records hacked by an anonymous collective known as “Guacamaya” and shared with news outlets by the transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets. The Mexican Defense Ministry leak previously made headlines for exposing military corruption and surveillance abuse, and now reveals the trace data on American-sold firearms recovered since 2018.

Despite efforts to stem the flow, these American firearms are smuggled south as part of the cycle of Latin-American narcotics headed north. The violence in Central America fueled, in part, by guns also has contributed to the migration crisis at the U.S. border.

As part of the leak, emails relaying U.S. government data between Mexican military leaders and PowerPoint presentations by Mexico’s attorney general show which American straw buyers were tied to the most weapons as of 2022… Among them is Texan Craig Adlong. He pleaded guilty in 2020 for lying on firearm transaction forms, saying the guns were for his personal use. He purchased 95 semi-automatic rifles at Guns Unlimited in Katy, Texas, making seven visits over two months… Sixty-six of those firearms were recovered in Mexico, according to the leak…

“Of the other six top purchasers, half are linked to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives scandal known as Fast and Furious… From 2006-2011 agents in Arizona stood down as straw purchasers illegally bought 2,000 guns at shops, intending to use the information to track trafficking patterns and arrest the kingpins. However, agents didn’t deliver the high-level arrests – and in the process, they lost track of hundreds of guns… One of those guns was recovered at the Nogales, Arizona, crime scene where U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed in 2010 when his tactical unit attempted to arrest a band of robbery suspects.

“Hundreds of Fast and Furious firearms have previously been traced to other shootings in Mexico. The new leak indicates hundreds more are still being found... ‘It’s appalling,’ said Peter Forcelli, a retired ATF deputy assistant director who recently wrote a book critical of Fast and Furious. ‘This is a stain we all wear. We had a duty to stop the flow of guns and we’re failing.’…

Mexican officials recovered more than 500 of the weapons made in Kentucky and sold in shops in 16 U.S. states. The AR-style rifles have become a weapon of choice for American mass shooters recently in Buffalo, New York, Louisville, Kentucky, and Nashville, Tennessee – as well as in Uvalde, Texas, where an 18-year-old killed 19 elementary students and two teachers two years ago... Police in Uvalde feared the rifle’s firepower, delaying their response to the shooting: ‘AR. He has a battle rifle,’ one officer reportedly told another.

“The second-most recovered firearm was the Colt Government pistol, with more than 480 recoveries. That model was the standard-issue U.S. military sidearm from 1911 to 1985… Another popular gun is the AK-47 replica Century Arms RAS47 made in Vermont. In Mexican slang, they’re known as ‘cuernos de chivo,’ goat’s horns, because of the curved magazines extending from the Soviet-era Kalashnikov knockoffs popularized in cartel culture… Equally popular in Mexico is the U.S.-imported WASR-10 version of the AK. That’s the Romanian-made rifle used by a shooter in Gilroy, California, in 2019 to kill three and wound 17. Those victims sued the Vermont importer alleging it is funneling ‘uniquely lethal’ semiautomatic rifles to criminals.”

Multiply this horror hundreds if not thousands of times. Spread the proliferation of firearms farther south into Latin America… and now, into Canada, a nation with very sensible gun control laws. As Vipal Mong, writing for the August 31st Wall Street Journal reports: “Rival gangs control parts of the tow-truck industry here, using the heavy-duty vehicles to transport drugs, extort car-crash victims with high fees, and fake automobile accidents to defraud insurance. They once resolved their territorial differences with their fists, but now a wave of gun smuggling from the U.S. has turned their fights into a lethal blood sport.

“This year through late August, Toronto shootings are up 50% compared with the same period last year and homicides are up 20%—a surge caused in part by ‘the tow-truck violence,’ said Inspector Paul Krawczyk of the Toronto Police Service’s guns-and-gangs unit. In all, about one in seven of Toronto’s shootings and dischargings of firearms this year have been related to the towing industry, police said… ‘It’s pretty brazen,’ Krawczyk said.” Pretty clearly, those guns are beginning to seep into other malign actors across Canada. “Thank you for sharing, America!”

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you want more asylum-seekers at our border, hope more judges are appointed who think gun control is mostly unconstitutional, enjoy the rise in American drug use.