Thread: 40% of guns used in Mexico crimes originated in Texas

http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_16015155

40% of guns used in Mexico crimes originated in Texas
By Daniel Borunda / El Paso Times
Posted: 09/08/2010 12:00:00 AM MDT

Forty percent of Mexico gun crimes traced by the ATF last year used guns originally sold in Texas, according to a report issued Tuesday by a coalition of U.S. mayors.

The bipartisan advocacy group Mayors Against Illegal Guns reported that 2,076 guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico were tracked to Texas by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives.

Texas had the highest percentage of any state in the study. Another 36 percent of guns seized in Mexico were traced to sales in New Mexico, Arizona and California, according to the report by the coalition of 500 mayors. El Paso is not listed as part of the group.

"Illegal guns and their accompanying violence devastate communities across our country. Now we know more about how guns purchased here have helped sustain violent drug wars in Mexico," New York City mayor and coalition co-chairman Michael R. Bloomberg said in a statement.

The report titled, The Movement of Illegal Guns Across the U.S.-Mexico Border, was based on ATF data provided to the organization in March.

The report mentioned "90 percent of guns recovered and traced from Mexican crime scenes originated from gun dealers in the United States."

An El Paso Times investigation last year found that the "90 percent" figure, which was even quoted by President Barack Obama, refers to only the percentage of the guns submitted by Mexico to the ATF for tracing and not all guns seized in Mexico.

A spokesman for the National Rifle Association declined to comment on the new report because he had yet to see it.

Mayors Against Illegal Guns reported the ATF traced more than 5,000 guns from Mexico in 2009. The report showed the period from when a gun is purchased and then recovered in a crime in the U.S. is nearly 11 years, but the period was three years for guns in Mexico.

A recent Mexican government report on the drug war stated more than 84,000 firearms have been seized in Mexico from December 2006 to July of this year.

The Mexican government reported the current violence is due to seven wars among drug cartels in various regions of the country. There have been more than 28,000 murders in Mexico linked to organized crime since December 2006.

In Juárez, about 2,000 people have been killed this year because of the war between the Juárez and Sinaloa drug cartels. The Sinaloa cartel is also called the Pacific cartel.

Juárez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz is among voices asking the United States to do more to stop the flow of weaponry, including high-powered AK-47s and AR-15 rifles preferred by cartel gunmen.

"A high percentage of weapons that come into Ciudad Juárez come from the United States, and Texas is the perfect corridor. It worries us a lot," Juárez city spokesman Jaime Torres said.

Torres said the Juárez government is thankful for inspections by U.S. federal agents on the international bridges looking for firearms destined for Mexico.

The ATF is attempting to keep weapons out of the hands of Mexican drug cartels by increasingly cooperating with Mexican authorities, working with U.S. gun dealers and placing a bigger emphasis on the border.

ATF spokesman Special Agent Tom Crowley said a large number of firearms smuggled to Mexico historically come from Texas simply because of the huge Texas-Mexico border.

"What's important to realize about weapons going into Mexico is that it's not only a border issue," Crowley said via telephone from Dallas. "In El Paso, we are real busy. Everyday we are working firearms cases. We got cases out here in Dallas, Oklahoma and - to be honest - all around the country we have cases."

Crowley said cooperation between the ATF and gun sellers is needed to identify "straw buyers," or customers purchasing weapons for somebody else, including gun traffickers.

Crowley said the ATF in the "near future" will be adding extra staff in El Paso, including firearm-trafficking investigators and agents gathering intelligence.

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Just for once.....I'd like to see someone report on WHO exactly is sending these guns into Mexico. I would bet that they come from illegal Mexicans and or Mexican people. Are any of them coming from real Americans???

Hill’s Lie: 90% US Guns Used In Mex-Crime
Despite US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s insistence that 90% of guns used in Mexican gang violence come from America, only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the U.S.

The lie could be excused as an omission of fact from Secretary Clinton. ATF Special Agent William Newell told FOX News that “over 90% of the traced firearms originate from the US,â€

first off they tried the percentage tricks back in 2008-08 during the Obama campaign. They are not giving the whole truth here.

"A recent Mexican government report on the drug war stated more than 84,000 firearms have been seized in Mexico from December 2006 to July of this year".

Now of this number they are reporting 2016 came from the US. That is not 90% that they are trying to represent in their report.

Thats less then 3% of total firearms siezed. The bigger question they are not reporting on his where is the other 97% of firearms coming from if only 3% is from the US?

Answer: From their neighbors to the south.

They can and do get fully automatic weapons from the south that they can't get from us and that is the type of firearm that the cartels want. They don't want semi-auto rifles.

Bloomberg and his anti-2nd amendment cronies are again trying to mislead people and the leftis newspapers are going along with it.

[quote]In 2007-2008, the Mexican government recovered 29,000 firearms at crimescenes in Mexico. Agent Newell reports that Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Out of that 11,000, only 6,000 were successfully traced – and out of that, 5,114, or 90%, actually came from the US.

The bottom line: only 17% of firearms used in Mexican violent crimes originate from the US.
Hillary’s numbers-smudge has been repeated by lazy newsreporters and those with a political axe to grind, such as CBS News’ Bob Schieffer and NBC’s Mark Potter. To follow the old axiom, the lie has become truth and even worked into the Congressional record by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who said at a Senate hearing: “It is unacceptable to have 90 percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico and used to shoot judges, police officers and mayors … come from the United States.â€

It certainly isn't a big surprise that media people distort the facts and or don't bother to retract bad information.

What really bothers me is all the dumb cows in this country who just believe things whether it's true or not. People who are believers of all kinds of bogus crap that they don't bother to verify or question because in reality, they don't really care. I really feel that it's those people who are undermining all of our efforts. I've said it before....I'm afraid that we're outnumbered.

US arms sales to foreign countries 1997 - 2009 tens of thousands of weapons to the Mexican military - Mexico is on page 48.
The Mexican military has proven itself to be corrupt. And while I agree that many of the guns that have been confiscated came from the US, I question it they were part of US military sales to the Mexican military.
http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/files/sa ... p19-US.pdf
Mexico chart is on page 48 of PDF.

Also:

Sale of the century: Bill Clinton's amazing arms bazaarCommonweal, May 20, 1994 by William D. Hartung

Bill Clinton didn't say much about foreign policy during the 1992 election campaign, but he did promise to change one of the most pernicious aspects of U.S. policy: this country's role as the world's number-one weapons trafficking nation. The Clinton/Gore team ran on a platform that pledged to "press for strong international limits on the dangerous and wasteful flow of weapons to troubled regions." And in November 1992, President-elect Clinton told a Capitol Hill news conference that he planned to "review our arms sales policy and to take it up with the other major sellers of the world as part of a long-term effort to reduce the proliferation of weapons of destruction in the hands of people who might use them in very destructive ways."

More than a year into Clinton's term, the rhetoric of restraint has given way to an unprecedented arms-selling spree. In fiscal year 1993, the United States sold over $31 billion worth of weaponry to more than 140 nations, the first time any nation had topped the $30-billion barrier.

This is not a case of private enterprise run amok--the federal government is directly involved in the vast majority of these sales, and changes in government policies and practices can have a tremendous impact on the scope of the weapons trade. The primary channel for U.S. arms sales is the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program, under which the Pentagon serves as a middleman by negotiating the deal with the foreign purchaser, collecting the funds, and disbursing the money to weapons manufacturing firms. A few billion dollars in sales of smaller weapons systems are made through direct commercial channels, but even these deals must be blessed with a license from the State Department. In theory, Congress can block a major sale if both houses pass resolutions of disapproval that can withstand a presidential veto, but in practice Congress has never voted down a sale.

Has the Clinton administration used its leverage over the arms business to fulfill the promises of restraint that were made in 1992? The short answer is no, and the reason for this inaction can be summed up in a familiar phrase--pork barrel politics. Even during the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton demonstrated his willingness to put aside his commitment to arms transfer controls if he thought it might cost him political support in key states. When a Saint Louis television reporter asked him in August 1992 whether he would back the sale of seventy-two McDonnell Douglas F-15 combat aircraft to Saudi Arabia, Clinton not only said yes, his Missouri campaign office immediately put out a press release broadcasting his support for the deal. The F-15 is built in Saint Louis, and it was clear that Clinton's decision had more to do with the political realities of Missouri than it did with the strategic realities of the Middle East. Amazingly, Clinton's endorsement of the sale came two-and-one-half weeks before President George Bush formally announced his decision to go ahead with it.

This tendency to sacrifice the long-term security benefits of arms-sales restraint for the short-term political and economic benefits of arms-sales promotion has carried over into the Clinton administration's first fifteen months in office. At the June 1993 Paris Air Show, Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown assured a gathering of U.S. aerospace executives that "we will work with you to help you find buyers for your products in the world marketplace, and then we will work with you to help close the deal." True to his word, Brown held meetings at the air show with defense officials from France and Malaysia at which he urged each of those nations to purchase U.S. military aircraft. At the February 1994 Asian aerospace arms exhibition in Singapore, the Clinton administration went a step further, sending seventy-five U.S. military personnel and twenty military aircraft to the show to help convince Asian military officials to buy American weaponry. This move toward an open partnership between the Pentagon and industry in pushing U.S. weapons overseas was all done at taxpayer expense, to the tune of more than half a million dollars.

Close on the heels of the Clinton administration's decision to have a strong U.S. military presence at the exhibition in Singapore, Air Force Vice-Chief of Staff David Carns floated an even more aggressive marketing scheme. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he advocated a plan to sell as many as 400 upgraded F-16 fighter planes out of Air Force stocks to countries such as Egypt, Malaysia, Morocco, Singapore, Thailand, and several Eastern European countries. Proceeds from the sales would then be used by the Air Force to buy new, top-of-the-line F-16s from Lockheed's production line in Fort Worth, Texas. While the plan would clearly offer a boost to the defense industry--both on the front end through contracts to upgrade the planes and on the back end when the revenues from exports are plowed back into new Pentagon procurement--it raises serious questions on both security and constitutional grounds. At a time when regional conflicts in the Middle East and Asia are cited by the Pentagon as the most likely threats to U.S. interests, does it make sense to be doling out sophisticated fighter planes to these areas at bargain prices? Furthermore, doesn't the plan to give the Air Force direct control over the proceeds of U.S. arms exports violate the principle of Congress's "power of the purse" in defense and foreign policy issues, the same principle that was violated by the Iran-contra initiatives?

There is no evidence yet that questions of this sort are troubling Bill Clinton or his key advisers as they engage in a long-promised review of U.S. arms transfer policy, scheduled for release later this year. If anything, there are signs that Clinton policymakers have reverted to the cold-war view that arms sales are an all-purpose foreign policy instrument that can be used to solve almost any problem, no matter how complex or intractable. A case in point is Undersecretary of State Lynn Davis's recent proposal to deliver thirty-eight F-16 fighter aircraft to Pakistan as part of a deal in which Pakistan would agree to "cap" its nuclear weapons program. The plan would not only require an override of the Pressler Amendment, which bars arms sales to Pakistan as long as it is pursuing a nuclear weapons capability, but it would provide Pakistan with a plane that its own military and intelligence officials acknowledge is the most likely delivery vehicle for a Pakistani nuclear bomb! Billions of dollars in U.S. military assistance during the 1980s didn't deter Pakistan from its nuclear program, and a few dozen fighter planes now are even less likely to do so. What the sale probably would do is spur a conventional arms race between Pakistan and India that would make it even harder to get either nation to renounce its nuclear ambitions.

Despite all these signs to the contrary, the battle to get Bill Clinton to honor his campaign promises to curb the weapons trade is far from lost. On another important security issue, the ill-conceived proposal to end the U.S. moratorium on nuclear testing and allow a loophole for so-called "small nuclear tests" that surfaced in the spring of 1993, the Clinton administration beat a hasty retreat in the face of an outpouring of opposition on editorial and op-ed pages, in the Congress, and from peace and arms-control organizations across the nation. The loophole for "small tests" has been shelved for the moment, and the U.S. is continuing to adhere to the moratorium on nuclear testing while pursuing an international agreement for a comprehensive test ban.
Beyond the question of how successful citizens' initiatives like the code of conduct campaign will be in changing the terms of the debate over arms-sales policy, the Clinton administration may ultimately be persuaded to change its ways for the simple reason that its current approach makes no sense in the violent and disorderly world that has evolved in the wake of the cold war. By even the narrowest of strategic and economic calculations, a policy of active arms-sales promotion has far more costs than benefits.

On the strategic front, unbridled weapons sales help to fuel regional arms races that increase the likelihood that U.S. forces will face heavily armed adversaries when they are sent into battle, either as peacekeepers or in unilateral interventions. The last three times the United States sent troops into combat in significant numbers--in Panama, Iraq, and Somalia--they faced adversaries that had received U.S. weapons or military technology in the period leading up to the conflict. Of four dozen ethnic and territorial conflicts that were under way as of mid-1993, combatants in thirty-nine of those wars had received U.S. weapons during the 1980s. U.S. weapons that were supplied to anti-Communist rebel groups in Angola and Afghanistan as part of the Reagan Doctrine have been used to carry out devastating civil wars; in the Afghan case, U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles have turned up on the international black market as prized items sought by all manner of rebel groups and terrorist organizations. The cold-war notion of using arms sales as a way to maintain regional "balances of power" or support trusted allies has been thoroughly and decisively discredited by the experience of the 1990s, when alliances, governments, and boundaries in large parts of the world are in a state of flux. It doesn't take an arms-control expert to recognize that pouring more weapons onto the world market at this moment in history is a dangerous gamble. A call to put stronger controls on who gets U.S. arms could appeal to a broad, mainstream audience, now that fear of the "Soviet threat" has been eliminated as a knee-jerk rationale for arms sales and military spending.
The oft-heard rationale of last resort for U.S. arms sales--"If we don't do it, somebody else will"--is even less persuasive now than it was during the cold war. The U.S. so dominates the market now that even a unilateral change in policy would have important short-term impacts in stemming the flow of arms to regions of tension. In 1992, the most recent year for which full statistics are available, U.S. sales to the third world were three-and-one-half times greater than those of France, ten times greater than those of Russia, and a hundred times greater than those of China. For the most advanced systems such as top-of-the-line fighter planes and main battle tanks, only a few West European allies sell equipment comparable to that offered by the United States, so it would be relatively easy to limit access to these systems given the requisite political will. For the broader trade in guns, missiles, and other "small arms" that are fueling many of the world's ethnic conflicts, a multilateral effort would be required to achieve meaningful controls. But even at this level, the United States could exert enormous political and diplomatic leverage if it were to adopt a true policy of controlling arms sales and pressuring other major suppliers to do the same.

Once the underlying realities of the arms trade are taken into account, the Clinton administration's arms-sales policy boils down to a combination of pork barrel politics and outmoded cold-war strategic thinking. Only a concerted campaign of public pressure will persuade Bill Clinton to abandon this misguided approach and redeem his campaign pledge to work toward controlling this deadly business.

WILLIAM D. HARTUNG is a senior research fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research and the author of And Weapons for All (Harper Collins, 1994), a critique of U.S. arms-sales policies from the Nixon through the Clinton administrations.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... _15254325/

The reality is - if the cartels want guns, they will get them, the bad guys alwasy do.

NEWMEXICAN...that certainly was quite disturbing. Looks and sounds like our government works for itself and NOT for the American people.

Most of the heavy weapons that are used in mass shootings in Mexico come from sources outside of the US. Many of the automatic weapons and military type granade launchers and such are stolen from the Mexican military or Federals and recycled to the cartels. Many weapons also come from former Federales who have quit or have been fired and then sell their weapons to cartels. The US is an easy target for the Mexican government to place blame on for the weapons that are confiscated.

The only reason why the US is an easy target for the Mexican government to blame for everything under the sun is because our stupid government passively allows it.

Originally Posted by elpasoborn

Forty percent of Mexico gun crimes traced by the ATF last year used guns originally sold in Texas, according to a report issued Tuesday by a coalition of U.S. mayors.

Well MEXICO, you just can't have it both ways now can ya? You blame America for your drug cartel problems because you claim America is using all the drugs. Well Texas blames MEXICO because you idiots can't control your own borders and keep YOUR own people from stealing/buying our guns and smuggling them into YOUR country and comitting crimes.

IT'S YOUR PROBLEM MEXICO!

OH, and these statistics came from our ATF? We know who's side they are on.