Only 8% of Mexican cartel guns come from US dealers

Houston Chronicle/San Antonio Express-News:

Barely 8 percent of the estimated 100,000 firearms seized in Mexico's drug wars over the past three years have been traced to U.S. sales by licensed gun dealers, Congress was told Thursday.

The finding could suggest many firearms with U.S. origins in the hands of Mexican drug cartels have been stolen or purchased at gun shows without federal record keeping.

Bill McMahon, deputy assistant director of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said Mexican authorities claim to have seized an estimated 100,000 firearms from drug cartels during the offensive launched by Mexican President Felipe Calderón.

Mexican authorities submitted 20,000 of those firearms to the ATF to trace their origins, enabling the U.S. agency to determine that 90 percent of the referred weapons — or 18,000 firearms — were manufactured, imported or sold in the U.S., McMahon said.

But only 44 percent of those U.S.-origin firearms — or about 7,900 weapons — were traced back to sales by federally licensed gun dealers in the United States, McMahon told the House Committee on Homeland Security.

Tracing firearms remains “an essential component” of curtailing firearms trafficking along the Southwest border, enabling the ATF to “establish the identity of the first retail purchaser of the firearm and then investigate how the gun came to be used in a crime or how it came to be located in Mexico,” McMahon said.

More than 6,600 federally licensed firearms dealers operate along the Southwest border.

...

Democrats such as Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., claimed “almost all guns” in Mexico's drug wars were coming from the United States, requiring stepped-up U.S. efforts to “do something about the river of guns going into Mexico.”

But Republicans including Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, and Michael Rogers, R-Ala., emphasized that few guns seized in Mexico actually have been traced back to the United States.

McCaul noted that some military-style weapons reaching Mexican cartels via Central America were manufactured in Russia or China.

Rogers said it was “really misleading” to claim that 90 percent of guns seized in Mexico had come from the United States when “just a fraction of the weapons” can be traced back to U.S. gun dealers.

...

I think that Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. has a different agenda than stopping gun sales that end up in Mexico. Otherwise she would be more honest about the source of the cartel's weapon purchases.

I still believe that a significant portion of their weapons are stolen from the Mexican army. Others are bought on the black market. Since US guns shops do not sell automatic weapons or RPG's they are unlikely sources for those weapons.

We need to help the Mexicans track the black market sales of weapons used by the cartel and cut off the source. To just focus on US dealers ignores 92% of the weapons used by the cartel. That is not smart policy.

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