The United States is an amazing place. It’s the Land of the Free. It’s a country people will risk their lives trying to cross open oceans on cobbled-together rafts just to reach. There’s simply no other place like it in the world.

And, it seems, we’re to blame for other countries’ problems.

Now, this isn’t always without cause. For example, if the U.S. has a trade embargo against a country and that country has a shortage of goods, you can make the case that its problem is because of us. That’s fair, even if it’s simplistic.

Yet, it seems that the U.S. is to blame for problems in other countries even when our government has taken action. For example, we’ve repeatedly heard that the problem with violence in Mexico is because of a lack of gun laws in America, even though God only knows how many guns ended up across the border because of the actions of the ATF.

It seems that if the U.S. restricted AR-15s and handgun sales here, the cartels–who have no problems getting drugs and other illicit goods–wouldn’t be able to get so-called “assault weapons” or handguns.

Now, the problem is “sniper rifles.”

North of the border, the .50-caliber sniper rifle is the stuff of YouTube celebrity, shown blasting through engine blocks and concrete walls. Deployed with U.S. troops to foreign wars, it is among the most destructive weapons legally available in the United States.

But every week, those rifles are trafficked across the border to Mexico, where increasingly militarized drug cartels now command arsenals that rival the weaponry of the country’s security forces. In many cases, criminals outgun police.

After years of failed U.S. and Mexican efforts to curb arms trafficking, groups such as the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa cartels are showcasing the military-grade weapons in slick propaganda videos and using them to defeat security forces in battle.

In a country with just a single legal gun shop, on a military base in the capital, roughly 2.5 million illicit American guns have poured across the border in the past decade, according to a new Mexican government study. That flood has been a key accelerant in the security crisis now confronting the country. The cartels are using assault rifles to kill record numbers of police officers — 464 in the first nine months of 2020 alone — and smaller armed groups are fueling historically high homicide rates.

Mexican officials, in rare public criticism, are now venting their frustration at what they say is the U.S. failure to stop the flow of .50-caliber rifles. At a time when the United States is pushing Mexico to target cartels more aggressively, U.S. laws that make .50-calibers and other destructive weapons easy to buy, along with a lack of enforcement at the border, are enabling those groups to expand their influence and activities in the country.

Mexico has problems, but those problems aren’t the fault of the United States.

For one thing, the government makes it impossible for Mexican citizens to defend themselves. As noted, the nation has a single gun store, and it’s on a military base. Many Mexicans are lashing out, calling for easier access to guns for the law-abiding Mexicans.

In addition, the cartels never could have come to power without Mexican corruption. It’s long been known that public officials and police were more than willing to take bribes to look the other way. That allowed the cartels to grow and maintain power until they got to the point they no longer had to worry about the government.

Now, they’re trying to target a gun that isn’t sold in mass quantities here in the states–not when compared to AR-15s, for example–and claiming that American sales of these guns are the problem.

Well, they might be coming from the U.S., but let’s also understand that if we could completely cut off the flow of these guns from here, they’d just get them from somewhere else. Hell, I’ve seen pics from the Crimea and Syria where people have built these in machine shops on their own. Besides, these are drug cartels. They have a lot of money and a desire to get guns. They’re going to get guns.

As such, if you want to cut them off at the knees, you have to go after them on a base level. You can’t go after a supply of guns and pretend that’s going to hurt them.

No, you have to wage war and destroy their ability to threaten the lawful civilian government. At the same time, you have to destroy the corruption rampant in the country so that any efforts don’t fall apart in an instant.

You don’t get to blame .50 caliber rifles for the problem. It’s not the guns that are to blame, and it never was.