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U.S. Is Arms Bazaar for Mexican Cartels – NYTimes.com

The Mexican agents who moved in on a safe house full of drug dealers last May were not prepared for the fire power that greeted them.

When the shooting was over, eight agents were dead. Among the guns the police recovered was an assault rifle traced back across the border to a dingy gun store here called X-Caliber Guns.

Now, the owner, George Iknadosian, will go on trial on charges he sold hundreds of weapons, mostly AK-47 rifles, to smugglers, knowing they would send them to a drug cartel in the western state of Sinaloa. The guns helped fuel the gang warfare in which more than 6,000 Mexicans died last year.

Mexican authorities have long complained that American gun dealers are arming the cartels. This case is the most prominent prosecution of an American gun dealer since the United States promised Mexico two years ago it would clamp down on the smuggling of weapons across the border. It also offers a rare glimpse of how weapons delivered to American gun dealers are being moved into Mexico and wielded in horrific crimes.

Maybe some of this is true. But some fundamental facts:

1) It isn’t an “assault rifle” if it isn’t capable of fully-automatic fire. It doesn’t matter if it is a “military style” weapon, or “looks like” an assault rifle, if it only fires one round for each pull of the trigger.

2) No American gun store can legally sell fully-automatic weapons to anyone who has not cleared VERY high hurdles of authorization under existing federal law, as well as state law. No one can just walk into a gun shop and buy one after filling out some paperwork. Most gun shops don’t have ANY automatic weapons for sale, because their opportunity to sell them is so limited, and the process so cumbersome, that stocking any would just tie up cash in inventory that is almost never sold.

3) It appears that no new law is required, because the gun shops that are knowingly aiding “straw purchases” are already breaking federal and state laws.

4) No weapon that is really an “assault rifle” can be purchased easily, and the chances of a “straw purchase” of such a weapon are exceedingly slim, because by definition it is fully automatic and requires extreme levels of authorization and qualification.

5) Articles such as the one quoted above usually omit these facts, using the term “assault rifle” to mean anything that simply looks “military style” and is semi-automatic, like many modern hunting rifles. They also tend to tar an entire legal industry with the misdeeds of a few. On that grounds, of course, the New York Times should be closed, permanently, given the number of lies it tells, and laws it breaks (even when they cannot be prosecuted for political reasons).

6) If you hear of Mexican shootings involving “machine guns” (i.e., fully automatic weapons), those guns were not bought using “straw purchases” from American gun stores.

7) The level of corruption in the Mexican police and military is so huge that many automatic weapons that are used illegally probably came directly from military stores.

8) Mexico has an enormous coastline, mostly very lightly patrolled.

Does anyone have any doubt that large numbers of weapons enter Mexico that way, including fully automatic assault weapons? What would make a smuggler take the risks of bringing South American drugs into Mexico, and not the illegal weapons necessary to defend the trade?

So: while no doubt some USA weapons have made their way into Mexico and been used in crimes, this kind of report has only one clear aim, and it is to add to the drumbeat for yet more restrictive USA gun laws.

But what else would we expect from the New York Times?

Tags: guns, media, Mexico