The BBC calls Mexico’s drug war “Made in the US”

They offer a sad and ironic quote from a Texas gun store owner who lost his inventory to robbers that put a “boulder” through his store’s glass front:

…he has since added steel bars to his store front, together with hi-tech glass that can withstand the impact of a car bomb.

“But the ultimate solution is for me to stay here at night with one of our AR-15s,” Mr Pruett says. “The next time they come through that door we’ll be ready.”

The robbers are smarter than that, however, as explained by the BBC. Other stores sell the guns legally through boulder-sized loop-holes in Texas law.

They do it by using so-called “straw purchasers”, individuals with clean criminal records who will comfortably pass the strict FBI background checks required of licensed firearms dealers.

Typically, straw purchasers are American citizens and green card holders in need of a little extra cash.

“What I would tend to look for would be young females buying high-powered rifles,” explains a Houston-based special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).

For operational reasons, the ATF asked the BBC to withhold the name of the agent, whose task is to detect straw purchases at the city’s more than 300 gun stores.

“We had a case of a single mum with two kids,” he says.

“She was behind on her rent, and a guy offered her $100 (£63) per gun – so she went and bought three guns and made $300 in fifteen minutes.”

Three guns for a mom and two kids. I thought that was considered normal in Texas.

The BBC report ends with some interesting data. Nearly 100,000 guns have been seized by the Mexican police and army. A quarter of those are traced and 90% of traces lead back to the US; 36% are from Texas. Although those numbers might seem high, they actually could be far higher. Border controls are not setup to stop assault rifles from going to Mexico.

Most drivers are waved through untroubled – only occasionally are southbound vehicles stopped.

One can only guess how many US guns are crossing the frontier undetected.

That does not make a lot of sense to me. It seems extremely short-sighted for the US, even if they think it is a great idea to have citizens with assault rifles at home, to allow a neighboring country plagued by violent gangs to stock up on assault rifles (unless they want to destabilize that country, like South Africa did with Mozambique and Angola for years before the arms supply-chain reversed).

A Houston-based special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) says the rise in assault rife exports can be linked to 2004; that was when drug gang weapons went from slow-fire pistols and shotguns to assault rifles and automatic handguns.

Since the ATF is not getting data on assault rifles headed south of the border, I wonder where they get their estimates from.

It sounds like a thinly-veiled reference to the US Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which had a ten-year sunset clause for a subtitle called the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act or federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB). The change in 2004 noticed by the ATF, in other words, might be a law enforcement anecdote linked to the end of the AWB rather than based on data gathered from seized, manufactured or sold weapons.

The Violence Policy Center, for example, published a statement in 2004 that the AWB actually failed to slow availability of assault weapons in America.

Soon after its passage in 1994, the gun industry made a mockery of the federal assault weapons ban, manufacturing “post-ban” assault weapons with only slight, cosmetic differences from their banned counterparts. The VPC estimates that more than one million assault weapons have been manufactured since the ban’s passage in 1994.

The sad truth is that mere renewal would have done little to stop this flood of assault weapons. Conversely, the end of the ban only makes official what was already known: assault weapons are readily available in America. The only difference is that the arbitrary distinction between pre- and post-ban assault weapons is now gone.

The assault rifle growth suggested by the ATF in 2004 also was probably not a response to Mexican government policy, soldiers or police. The first major Mexican government armed initiative against drug gangs came after December 2006, when a new President of Mexico took office and announced his plans to fight crime.