In Friday’s article on Mexico homicides, I briefly mentioned the myth that Mexican homicides are driven by American guns. This myth drives so much of the rhetoric about Mexican crime, that it bears some examination in slightly more detail.
For example, in the wake of the Florida shooting, The National Observer ran an article titled “More guns, less crime? Not according to the data.“ The article centered around the idea that crime in Mexico is a result of “too many” American guns. The central premise of the claim is that an overwhelming majority of guns used for illegal purposes in Mexico come from the United States. The National Observer claims:
The aggregate data almost certainly understates the global impact of American guns. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the vast majority of guns seized and traced in Mexico are of American origin. About a quarter of these weapons are high-caliber weapons, such as AK and AR-15 type semiautomatic rifles.
But, Stratfor has provided some pretty damning research for that position in an article titled “Mexico’s Gun Supply and the 90 Percent Myth.” The research concludes that the calculations behind the “90 percent myth” are so sketchy as to be extremely misleading. Specifically:
Interestingly, the part of this argument pertaining to guns has been adopted by many politicians and government officials in the United States in recent years. It has now become quite common to hear U.S. officials confidently assert that 90 percent of the weapons used by the Mexican drug cartels come from the United States. However, a close examination of the dynamics of the cartel wars in Mexico — and of how the oft-echoed 90 percent number was reached — clearly demonstrates that the number is more political rhetoric than empirical fact.
By the Numbers
As we discussed in a previous analysis, the 90 percent number was derived from a June 2009 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report to Congress on U.S. efforts to combat arms trafficking to Mexico (see external link).
According to the GAO report, some 30,000 firearms were seized from criminals by Mexican authorities in 2008. Of these 30,000 firearms, information pertaining to 7,200 of them (24 percent) was submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for tracing. Of these 7,200 guns, only about 4,000 could be traced by the ATF, and of these 4,000, some 3,480 (87 percent) were shown to have come from the United States.
This means that the 87 percent figure relates to the number of weapons submitted by the Mexican government to the ATF that could be successfully traced and not from the total number of weapons seized by Mexican authorities or even from the total number of weapons submitted to the ATF for tracing. In fact, the 3,480 guns positively traced to the United States equals less than 12 percent of the total arms seized in Mexico in 2008 and less than 48 percent of all those submitted by the Mexican government to the ATF for tracing. This means that almost 90 percent of the guns seized in Mexico in 2008 were not traced back to the United States.
The remaining 22,800 firearms seized by Mexican authorities in 2008 were not traced for a variety of reasons. In addition to factors such as bureaucratic barriers and negligence, many of the weapons seized by Mexican authorities either do not bear serial numbers or have had their serial numbers altered or obliterated. It is also important to understand that the Mexican authorities simply don’t bother to submit some classes of weapons to the ATF for tracing. Such weapons include firearms they identify as coming from their own military or police forces, or guns that they can trace back themselves as being sold through the Mexican Defense Department’s Arms and Ammunition Marketing Division (UCAM). Likewise, they do not ask ATF to trace military ordnance from third countries like the South Korean fragmentation grenades commonly used in cartel attacks.
Of course, some or even many of the 22,800 firearms the Mexicans did not submit to ATF for tracing may have originated in the United States. But according to the figures presented by the GAO, there is no evidence to support the assertion that 90 percent of the guns used by the Mexican cartels come from the United States — especially when not even 50 percent of those that were submitted for tracing were ultimately found to be of U.S. origin.
But note that the Observer article goes beyond indicting the US for Mexican violence. By referring to the “global impact of American guns” it’s also implied that US guns are responsible for region-wide violence in Latin America.
But, the 2012 Small Arms survey suggests otherwise. First of all, official government stockpiles of guns are a clear source of illegal guns in Brazil:
[M]any weapons are diverted from Brazilian government-controlled stockpiles to the illicit market. Dreyfus confirms this finding, showing that 18 per cent of firearms that have been traced back to their origins stem from official institutions, including the military police and the army.
Illegal weapons are also tracked back to government sources in Mexico, as the Stratfor report notes:
There are also many .45-caliber and 9 mm semiautomatic pistols and .357 revolvers obtained from deserters from the Mexican military and police, purchased from corrupt Mexican authorities or even brought in from South America (guns made by manufacturers such as Taurus and Bersa).
But, if we want to blame the US for Mexican guns, there is one place we can truly lay blame: the US government. Famously, of course, there was the “Fast and Furious” debacle in which the US government handed over guns to Mexican cartels as part of a failed and cockamamie plan to track the guns.
But the US has also played a part in putting many guns into the black market through the US’s involvement in Central American civil wars in previous decades. The Small Arms Survey notes:
El Salvador and Honduras were the largest recipients of weaponry from the US government in the 1980s and early 1990s, El Salvador because of the war against the communist guerrillas and Honduras because it was the primary base of operations for the US-backed Nicaraguan resistance known as the Contras
These guns later worked their way into black markets in the region.
