The civil suit filed by the government of Mexico against several U.S. gun manufacturers seeking to hold them responsible for cartel violence has yet to be heard in court, but the Mexican government is pushing hard in the court of public opinion to try to justify the litigation. In an op-ed at the Washington Post, Alejandro Celorio Alcántara, a legal advisor to the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, claims that his country has done all it can to prevent illicit arms trafficking among cartel members, but it’s just not enough.

This deadly flood must be stopped at its source. The policy of the gun manufacturers is to sell their guns to any gun dealer that has a U.S. federal license. It doesn’t matter if the dealer might have a history of selling to “straw purchasers” or others who could supply to gun-trafficking rings; no matter that the customer is buying AK-47 and AR-15 assault weapons in bulk; no matter that the dealer sells at gun shows where background checks are not required.

First off, most firearms manufacturers don’t sell directly to federally licensed firearms retailers. Instead, the manufacturers sell to distributors, who in turn sell to individual gun stores. And yes, it is the policy of both manufacturers and distributors to deal with companies that are in compliance with federal law. For the Mexican government and the anti-gun attorneys working on the case like Brady’s Jonathan Lowy, however, that’s not good enough. They want to force gun makers to abide by anti-gun regulations that the gun control lobby can’t get enacted through law.

We respect the Second Amendment rights of the American people. Our efforts are not aimed at them but at organized crime groups in Mexico. Some might argue that guns in themselves are not malicious, and that evil comes from the person who misuses them. Hammers are not evil in themselves. But we would all rightly condemn a hardware store that continued to sell heavy-duty hammers to customers with a known track record of using them to kill and create mayhem.

Would we? Personally, I’d probably wonder why it is that people with a known track record of using hammers to kill and create mayhem are still out on the street instead of being behind bars. And that gets us back to Mexico’s claim that it’s doing everything it can to clamp down on cartel violence and gun trafficking (Alcántara doesn’t say anything at all about his government’s efforts to crack down on illegal drugs heading north from Mexico into the United States). The administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador isn’t actually doing everything it can to crush the cartels. In fact, Obrador’s policy is one of “hugs, not bullets,” and it’s failing miserably.

As Mexican drug cartels continue to fight over lucrative drug trafficking routes, an official confirmed Thursday that six male bodies were discovered hanging off a bridge in the city of Zacatecas in Mexico.

According to Reuters, a source at the local prosecutor’s office said the half-naked bodies were discovered early morning. The source requested anonymity because he was not allowed to disclose the information to the public. Some newspapers in Mexico also reported the horrible find.

The city of Zacatecas, which is the capital of the state with a similar name, has been heavily damaged by the intense violence between rival Mexican drug cartels.

The Sinaloa Cartel and its biggest rival, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, battled over key trafficking routes in recent months.

Last month, 11 bodies were also found hanging under bridges in Zacatecas state. Some of the incidents were accompanied by threatening messages.

The cartels are multi-national, multi-billion dollar criminal enterprises that are not only responsible for thousands of homicides in Mexico but tens of thousands of drug overdose deaths in the United States every year. The common enemy of the U.S. and Mexican governments are the cartels themselves, but as long as Joe Biden and Andrés Manuel López Obrador are in charge, fighting the cartels is going to take a backseat to waging war on American gun makers and tens of millions of responsible gun owners.