The headline says enough: Univision reporter Leon Krauze says President Trump must “ban assault weapons” if he really wants to help Mexico.
Mexico has very strict gun control laws, and yet firearms are the weapons of choice in growing murder epidemic in Mexico. And banning them in the U.S. would do nothing. As to the source of weaponry in Mexico, John Lott said this. (Bold added.):
So where do Mexican criminals get their guns? “Most cartels buy in bulk, and the weapons are coming from places like Nicaragua and other South American countries. Also Asia and some from the Middle East,” a Tijuana-based police authority who requested anonymity recently told Fox News.
According to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, 70% of all criminally owned guns in Mexico come from the U.S., but these figures are based only on the limited number of guns Mexican authorities have seized, traced and submitted to the agency for checking. That’s a small subset of guns. For instance, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF in 2007-08, though it seized 29,000 guns during that time. Of those, 6,000 were successfully traced and 90% of those traceable weapons came from the U.S. Thus by one estimate only about 17.6% of the firearms Mexico collected in total could be traced back to America.
“These kinds of guns—the auto versions of these guns—they are not coming from El Paso,” Ed Head, a firearms instructor in Arizona who spent 24 years as a U.S. Border Patrol agent, told Fox News. “They are coming from other sources. They are brought in from Guatemala. They are brought in from places like China. They are being diverted from the military. But you don’t get these guns from the U.S.”
Señor Krauze doesn't want the U.S. military in Mexico, that's obvious -- nationalism is a powerful force in every country. But if he is trying to persuade anyone not already devoted to the left, he could do better with a pure nationalism rationale rather than the miss-aimed anti-gun tact.
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4:12 PM 11/6/2019
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