The country of Mexico has tettered on the edge of being a failed state for years now. The cartels control massive amounts of territory, essentially nullifying Mexican law in those regions, and the government has largely been powerless to do anything about it.
So, they did the next best thing from their perspective. They blamed the US.
You see, we don’t have the same kind of gun control they have down there, and because of that, it’s our fault that people who make and produce drugs also get their hands on guns.
Because they don’t have deep enough pockets to get them some other way.
Mexico has tried to put the onus on the US regarding guns, thankfully to little avail. Now, the US and Mexico are teaming up to do something that might sort of work.
The Biden administration is stepping up efforts to stem the flow of guns southwards across the U.S.-Mexico border. The U.S. and Mexican governments are working together as part of their common fight against drug cartels.
U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar visited the Houston field office of the ATF for a meeting with multiple agencies involved in cracking down on the southbound flow of arms.
“We estimate that about 70% percent of the guns that end up in Mexico are guns that come from the United States of America,” Salazar said. “We have new tools that have been created as a result of the Bipartisan Communities Safe Act, which makes it a felony to engage in the kind of arms trafficking that we’re seeing here.” Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act just over a year ago.
According to Fred Malinowski, ATF special agent in charge for Houston, his agency opened 400 firearms trafficking investigations last year, and it’s on pace to exceed that number this year. Nationwide, he said, seizures of firearms bound from the U.S. to Mexico are up 111% over the past nine months.
Of course, no one bothers to say what those new tools created by the BSCA actually were, which is interesting because straw purchases were already illegal, as was transporting guns across international borders.
In other words, it sounds like they’re touting the new law to pretend it’s actually doing anything.
Still, cracking down on illegal arms shipments heading down to Mexico is a good thing. It’ll stop American guns from getting into the cartels’ hands, which means it’ll be much harder to blame the US for cartel violence.
But don’t anyone think for one moment that this will somehow make Mexico suddenly safer.
The cartels have deep pockets. Someone out there will be happy to sell them firearms. They might actually be more deadly than what they get from the US, but that’s not going to be our concern.
What matters here is stopping the flow of guns into Mexico, and I’m glad to see the feds finally take that seriously.
Especially since it seems they’re no longer helping to supply those guns via Operation Fast & Furious. (Yeah, they keep hoping we’ll forget about that one. We’re not likely to ever do so.)
Yet despite touting last summer’s gun control law’s passage, they could always have cracked down on this. They could have always stepped up and gone after straw buyers and people trying to smuggle guns across the border into Mexico.
The fact that they didn’t was a conscious choice, likely because they hoped they could leverage that to get some kind of gun control passed. Well, they did and now we’ve got them pretending it actually did something, but anyone with half a brain should be able to see through this nonsense.
