"Study: A quarter million US guns are smuggled into Mexico every year"

[applegrove]

Study: A quarter million US guns are smuggled into Mexico every year

By Tim Johnson, McClatchy at the Christian Science Monitor

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2013/0319/Study-A-quarter-million-US-guns-are-smuggled-into-Mexico-every-year

"SNIP..........................................


Some 2.2 percent of all US gun sales are made to smuggling rings that take firearms to Mexico, a scale of illegal trafficking that’s “much higher than widely assumed,” an academic study released Monday found.

An average of 253,000 weapons purchased in the United States head south of the border each year, according to the study by four scholars at the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute and the Igarape Institute, a research center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Profit margins at many gun stores are razor thin, and thousands of US gun vendors would go out of business without the illicit traffic to Mexico, said Topher McDougal, an economist educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who’s one of the study’s authors.

The study’s conclusions are likely to add to controversy over what role US weapons smugglers play in Mexico’s drug violence. Mexican officials have long blamed lax gun laws in the United States for the availability of weapons in Mexico, which has only one gun store and considers gun ownership a privilege, not a right.


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[Xipe Totec]

1. That does not include the army surplus bazookas, rpgs, and hand grenades nt

[madrchsod]

2. the last i heard the death toll in the mexican drug war is 50,000

i read another report where the figures were at 70,000. 50-70 thousand people murdered just across our border and is it any wonder why people want to escape the hell they in through each day

[applegrove]

3. Yeah. And by get rid of the gun exporters and helping Mexico be safer the US could cut down

on illegal immigrants that way too. But that will never happen. Not until the people take the NRA on face to face.

[slackmaster]

4. Demand is high thanks to Nixon's War On (some) Drugs

[DanTex]

5. Interesting, though not surprising.

The number of guns in Mexico traced back to the US is something like 5,000 or 10,000 per year, but, naturally, those traces account for only a small fraction of the overall flow, so 250,000 makes sense.

More evidence that the US gun laws are fueling violence not just in the US but also in other countries. And it's not just Mexico. In Canada, a lot of crime guns come from the US as well.

[ellisonz]

6. Sad that 250,000 guns are only 2.2% of our gun sales.