Mexico's restrictive gun law does not work

$205 Million drug money seized by the Mexican ...Image via Wikipedia
Washington Post:

In all of Mexico, there is only one gun store. The shop, known officially as the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales, is operated by the Mexican military. The clerks wear pressed green camouflage. They are soldiers.

The only gun store in Mexico is not very busy.

To go shopping for a gun in Mexico, customers must come to Mexico City - even if they live 1,300 miles away in Ciudad Juarez. To gain entry to the store, which is on a secure military base, customers must present valid identification, pass through a metal detector, yield to the security wand and surrender cellphones and cameras.

To buy a gun, clients must submit references and prove that their income is honestly earned, that their record is free of criminal charges and that their military obligations, if any, have been fulfilled with honor. They are fingerprinted and photographed. Finally, if judged worthy of owning a small-caliber weapon to protect home and hearth, they are allowed to buy just one. And a box of bullets.

Mexico has some of the toughest gun-control laws in the world, a matter of pride for the nation's citizens. Yet Mexico is awash in weapons.

...
The Post has been running a series on Mexico's problems controlling guns and has been making the bogus charge that most of them come from the US. In fact corruption in Mexico makes most of them available from the army, law enforcement and from a black market that imports many weapons from Central America and other ares. They get less than 10 percent of their weapons from the US according to ATF records. What the Post did was misinterpret a report on weapons Mexico shipped to the US to check the origin. While these were a small number of the total weapons being sold in Mexico, most of them did originate in the US. The Post took this inflated figure and ran with it and has been touting it despite all the evidence to the contrary. It is irresponsible journalism and the the Post should admit their factual error and correct it.

Below are some of the articles who repeat this error of fact.
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