Almost every gun in Mexico came from the US
Absolutely untrue, at least in the way that you most likely mean it. The cartels aren’t getting things like M16s and 50 Caliber Automatics by purchasing them in the US because those things aren’t for sale in the US. They do get a shit ton of Pistols and Semi-Automatic rifles by smuggling them in from the US though.
…almost half of the trace requests come up blank because these forms are all filed on paper in a warehouse that they aren’t even allowed to index properly.
Partially. According to BATFE trace data there are several things that will cause a trace request to come back “blank”.
Unable to Determine a Purchaser" refers to those firearms that were manufactured in/imported into the U.S. but ATF was unable to determine the first retail purchaser through the trace process. Common reasons ATF is unable to identify a purchaser:
Incomplete firearms identifying data on the trace request form
Incomplete or never received out‐of‐business federal firearms licensee records (upon discontinuance of business by a federal firearms licensee, the records shall be delivered within 30 days to ATF or other Attorney General stipulated location (Title 18 U.S.C. 923(g)(4))
Altered or obliterated firearm serial numbers
The firearm is considered to be too old to trace
Current federal firearms licensee records are incomplete or missing, or the federal firearms licensee was unresponsive to ATF’s request for trace information.
Which intersects with my first point in a non-obvious way. If a member of the Mexican Army leaves, especially if they desert, they often take their issued weapons with them and those weapons are often provided to the MM by the USM. Those weapons don’t have a “Retail Entry Point” to trace since they basically go from the US Manufacturer directly to the US Military and from there to the Mexican Military. They also sometimes flat out sell them.
To be clear, there is a problem with North - South firearms smuggling but its not quite how you stated it.
Second we need to legalize drugs.
God Yes. The failed “War on Drugs” by the United States has been an incredible source of misery all across the world. It needs to end NOW.
You have a lot of good information that I am not going to debate about, but I wouldn’t say “Absolutely untrue” as I used the modifier “almost”. The majority of guns that are used in these killings do come across the border and are pistols and smaller caliber guns.
Do cartels have .50 caliber rifles and fully automatic, yes of course. But cartels aren’t arming their enforcers and hit man with those type of weapons. They are hard to conceal and expensive if you lose them, and at this point most teenagers would rather be a Zeta than a cop, so they have an infinite labor pool. The M16 is often worth more than the person holding it to them. They save those for their big intra-cartel war plays and to scare the government back into submission.
If all the Mexican government had to worry about were diverted military weapons there job would be significantly easier.
That’s not even getting to the discussion of how easy it is to drop an auto sear onto the back of a glock in minutes or pay someone in Mexico with a machine shop to do something similar with a lot of rifles.
