New Gun Debate Runs South of the Border

The latest battle over the Second Amendment is being fought outside of the country. Mexico, whose government is waging war on its insurgent drug cartels, got a recent visit from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She said that the criminals “are outgunning law enforcement officials,” in the land of our southern neighbors.

“And since we know that the vast majority, 90% of that (weaponry) comes from our country, we’re going to try to stop it from getting there in the first place,” Clinton said, as quoted by the New York Daily News.

The Obama administration plans to mobilize a cadre of federal agents along the border, but not to check for contraband coming into the country — rather, to search it going outward. The hope is they’ll locate streams of dangerous weapons reportedly used in the drug war, in which 6,000 people died this past year.

Sounds like something that could be a useful exercise. But where things get contentious is when politicians begin talking about how gun laws are contributing to the problem.

Mexican President Felipe Calderón said during a visit to Britain last week that there was a “correlation” between his country’s drug violence and the end of the U.S. ban on sales of assault-style weapons, according to the Arizona Republic.

The Economist newspaper says that “Mexican police claim that since the ban lapsed in 2004, the cartels have become much more powerfully armed: of 30,000 guns they have seized since December 2006, 15,000 are assault weapons, nearly all bought at the 7,500 or so gun shops on the American side of the border,” The Econmist said.

Mexico and the U.S. have very different gun laws — or at least they differ on how such laws are enforced, the Arizona Republic’s article says. That creates a “vacuum” that feeds drug trafficking,” according to one source in the article.

Just how many guns come from the U.S. that have been used in the Mexican violence depends on who you ask.

Fox News reports that one a tossed about fact — that 90 percent of the weapons used to commit crimes in Mexico come from the United States — is simply a myth (they believe it to be more around 17 percent). This number, myth or fact, helped bolster calls for a revived assault weapons ban.

As we’ve reported before, this argument, however, is a two way street. Here’s the Economist on the other side of the coin:

“John Barrasso, a Republican senator from Wyoming, said in El Paso this week that violence in Mexico is an argument for more assault weapons, not fewer: “Why would you disarm someone when they potentially could get caught in the crossfire?” He continued: “The United States will not surrender our second-amendment rights for Mexico’s border problem.”

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