Gun Smuggling from Mexico to the US

Rev. Jesse Jackson (Famous American racial advocate) recently suggested on MSNBC that the 500+ murders in Chicago in 2012 were attributable to firearms smuggled 1,300 miles from Mexico to the Windy City.

Rev. Jackson: "These guns come from the suburbs and from Mexico." The advocates of gun control keep ranting about firearms being shipped wantonly from the US to Mexico.*

*While it has always been debatable how many of Mexico's weapons come from America, we do know that well over 2,000 were delivered to the drug cartels courtesy of the US Department of Justice through Operation Fast & Furious and that those firearms were the source of over 300 deaths in Mexico.

Officially, Mexico's homicide rate in 2008 was 2.4 times greater than that of the US.** Brazil's homicide rate is 4.2 times greater. However, those statistics are artificially lowered for the sake of reporting, because the real numbers would be shocking and would deter tourism. The body count from President Calderon's war on drugs that everybody in Mexico knows to have been an abject failure, is now estimated at 120,000. That's a far different number than the artificially low "official" number - 50,000.

**The homicide rates as reported in the 2011 Global Study on Homicide, conducted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime shows that the latest reportable numbers come from 2008.

However, there is cause for hope and change that will improve the Mexican economy yet again. Because of soaring firearms prices in the US due in large part to efforts by both President Obama and Vice President Biden to promote a 'run on firearms' in stores, many cartels are planning to ship firearms north. There is a market in the US now that was not there in the past. Both Los Caballeros Templarios and Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion are in the process of buying more firearms from sources in the former Soviet Union and China principally with the intent to satisfy the demand generated by President Obama's policies.

Even though many Americans feel that tougher laws will prevent smuggling, the tough laws now in place don't stop thousands of TONS of methamphetamine and cocaine from being shipped from Mexico into the US today. If you can ship a ton of meth, you can ship a ton of AK-47's. Where many Americans would not purchase drugs, the lure of inexpensive (compared to prevailing rates in gun stores) firearms and 7.62x39 ammunition opens up an entirely new market.

The US could solve this budding problem by not artificially increasing the 'street price' of firearms, but the Obama Administration doesn't see it that way. Their concept of "gun free zones" is backfiring with unintended consequences.