Nearly 17,000 guns recovered in Mexico were traced to the United States. More than a thousand came from Arizona, according to hacked Mexican data.
PHOENIX — Mexico’s lawsuit against five Arizona gun stores, alleging the stores assisted in the trafficking of weapons to Mexico, is moving into the discovery phase. Gun stores have aggressively denied the allegations.
This comes as a massive leak of Mexican military data, reported by USA Today and published by researcher John Lindsay-Poland, reveals how many weapons seized at Mexican crime scenes and cartels can be traced back to the United States.
Data shows that between 2018 and 2020, nearly 17,000 guns were traced to the United States and 1,126 of those guns came from Arizona. About half of the guns came from Phoenix and Tucson, but also from all corners of the state.
‘Firearms and cash flow south to Mexico. Drugs and violence flow north.
Bernard Zapor, retired ATF special agent in charge and ASU associate professor, said this has been a problem for decades.
“They come from regular firearms traffickers, they go into the hands of people who are involved in trafficking, they get to Mexico and they result in death,” Zapor said. “There’s really no specific law to stop this or prevent it, so it makes it very difficult.”
Mexico has only two gun stores in the country and it takes months to get approval to buy one, which is why cartel members often pay Americans a considerable amount to legally purchase firearms in the U.S. and then make them pass.
It is known as stubborn buying and is illegal. The ATF defines a probate purchase as the illegal purchase of a gun by an individual, a “straw purchaser,” on behalf of a person who is prevented from legally purchasing a firearm.
But Zapor said it’s not the gun stores that are to blame.
“Federal firearms license holders are not at fault in this,” Zapor said. “It is the weakness of our laws that allows this to happen.”
Zapor said there are few ATF special agents, which makes it challenging to crack down on these incidents. He also said the United States lacks a specific trafficking statute that is effective in enforcement and prevention.
“To do this type of work with firearms trafficking, you may be dealing with people who are in the straw buying and smuggling business who don’t have a criminal record because they have to be clean of that to be able to participate and buy the firearms. So I think, unfortunately, politically, people have fallen into the illusion that there is some kind of network that prevents this from happening,” Zapor said.
While much of the attention on the southern border is what goes into Arizona, what goes out is also part of the problem.
“Firearms and cash flow south to Mexico. “Drugs and violence are flowing north,” Zapor said. “It’s incredibly dangerous for the United States and public safety that this is happening there.”
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