Since 2008, the United States has invested more than 3 billion dollars to help stabilize Mexico and stop the increase in extreme violence. The American arms industry and pressure groups have undermined these efforts by promoting a lax regulation and application of the law.
This has generated chaos south of the border, and its effects have spread to the United States, promoting illegal drug trafficking and organized crime.
Meanwhile, the federal blockade to the exchange of firearms tracking data, established by the 2003 Tiahrt amendments, makes it difficult to monitor the illegal trade of firearms between the United States and Mexico to study these effects.
In this context, the Professor of Economic Development, Topher McDougal, and the research journalists, Sean Campbell, conducted an investigation in an effort to follow the flow of illicit weapons trafficked from the United States to Mexico and quantify what this flow has caused.
Data collection
They gathered records from various sources to create a firearms database sold by licensed American gunsmiths and then trafficked to Mexico. These businesses have a license from the US government to sell or manufacture and sell firearms and ammunition in the United States, and include independent assemblies, store chains and pawn houses.
They registered two data sets obtained through a request for information to the Sedena and two more sources.
- From 210 to 2023, about 133 thousand weapons were confiscated by security authorities.
- Around 5,700 firearms acquired by the Police between 2003 and 2019.
- The information of the Mexico Government filtered by Guacamaya Leaks in 2022, included firearms tracking data from November 2018 to December 2020 of the National Center for Analysis, Planning and Intelligence of the Office of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives of the United States (ATF).
- This data set contains information on more than 24,000 firearms; 15,000 of them were acquired in the United States.
- About 100 American judicial cases were related to 4,200 small weapons illegally trafficked from the United States to Mexico. Approximately 1,900 cases include the purchase date.
Of the 28 thousand records that the investigation managed to collect, around 13 thousand were linked to specific addresses of firearms distributors licensed in the US.
In most years, the ATF could not determine the final buyer in approximately half of its US firearms tracers recovered in Mexico. In the end, the researchers managed to track about 9,014 weapons, from the specific seller to Mexico.
Other sources for the collection of research data has to do with infractions related to firearms, originally acquired from the ATF by the non -profit organization Brady: united against violence with weapons, through a request protected by the Law of Freedom of Information for its Armerías Transparency Project.
The 4 thousand infractions to federal firearms between 2015 and 2018 come from ATF inspection reports and include warning letters, warning conferences and licensed revocation recommendations.
Using these four data sets, a previous estimate and two additional studies, researchers modeled the number of weapons trafficked annually through the border with Mexico, to understand the characteristics of firearms trafficking to Mexico from multiple perspectives.
Weapons flow
The counting of the counting was performed using the capture-recipient method, using the data of the Sedena and the filtered ATF. The Sedena data set contains weapons seized by the Mexican Army, while the ATF filtered data set contains weapons seized by Mexican agencies.
For an ideal comparison of capture and recapture, the leaked data would include all the records of the Sedena, but only 26.5% overlap.
Combination with estimates derived from five different sources:
- The seizures of firearms made by the Mexican authorities from January 2010 to March 1, 2023 were originally acquired from US Arms to Mexico.
- Total weapons production from 1993 to 2022.
- An estimate of 253 thousand firearms trafficked per year between 2010 and 2012 of The Way of the Gun: Estimating Firearms Traffic Across The Us-Mexico Border of the University of San Diego/Igarapé Institute, of which one of us was co-author.
- An estimate of 730 thousand firearms trafficked per year according to the Partnership for the Americas Commission study carried out in 2008 by the Brookings Institution.
- The 2021 report of the United States Government Responsibility Office Traffic Traffic: United States efforts to interrupt weapons to Mexico would benefit from additional data and analysis, which refers to an estimate of the Mexican government of 200 thousand firearms trafficked per year.
Through the political survey model, the team estimated that, between 72 thousand 819 and 258 thousand 101 firearms were sold in the United States and trafficked to Mexico in 2022. The average estimate was 135 thousand firearms trafficked from the United States to Mexico in 2022.
To have an idea of the effects that this flow of weapons has on the people who live in Mexico, the researchers made a comparison and estimation of traffic with the data on homicides in Mexico of the United Nations Office against drugs and crime, through the World Bank, by 1990-2022.
Analyzing the difference in that relationship during the federal prohibition of EU assault weapons of 1994-2004, it showed that a 1 % increase in traffic leads to an increase of 0.48 % in homicide rates.
More than two thirds of firearms recovered in Mexico and tracked up to a buyer come from the United States, according to ATF figures. About 6% of these weapons were imported legally.
In addition, the investigators discovered that an average increase of 10% in the requests for police guns between 2006 and 2018 led to an increase of 1.4%, on average, in illegal seizures of weapons the following year.
And, in reverse, a 10% increase in illegal seizures of weapons in each of those years corresponded to an 18.5% increase in the requests for firearms of the police the following year.
The economic climate and the rates of crimes not related to firearms could also be related to police gun purchases, but we do not control these factors.
Regulation and execution
Using data from judicial cases related to firearms, around 2,900 firearms have serial number, and 19 of them coincide with the Filtered Data on the track tracking of the ATF.
The details of the judicial records, such as the place of recovery in Mexico or the distributor where weapons were bought, were identical to those of the leaked data. The 19 coincidences came from nine judicial cases in five states, and these cases were generated independently of the leaked data. This confirmed the authenticity of the leaked data.
Regarding the regulation of weapons that are sold in the United States to neighboring states, such as Mexico, using the eight firearms laws that require reports at the EU point of sale, in contrast to laws of the different states they found that:
- Most firearms laws reduce the amount of time that weapons pass in the illicit market.
- Purge laws, which stipulate that the owner of the Armería or the State retain the background purchase or verification records, result in a probability between 126% and 257% greater to recover an illegal weapon in a given day.
- More weapons laws in neighboring states increase the probability that weapons sold in a state recover in that state by approximately 1.9%.
The findings coincide with previous studies that show that the most strict weapons purchase laws in the US reduce the amount of firearms that end in illicit markets nationwide and state.
We also propose the hypothesis that some of the holders of federal firearms licenses associated with weapons records in the data would already be known by the police authorities and that we could measure the impact of compliance actions.
Using the Brady data set of violations of the Code of Firearms Distributors of ATF from 2014 to 2018 to match the tracked firearms with licenses.
We analyzed the data using three different approaches and the three showed that more summons for violation of firearms laws lead to less illicit weapons.
In addition, they found that between 2014 and 2018:
- The ATF citations reduced the number of weapons sold to traffickers between 20% and 44%.
- The licensees who received compliance actions (warning letters, warning conferences or license revocation warns) contributed between 5% and 21% more weapons to traffic between the United States and Mexico than licensees who did not receive any regulatory action.
The ATF issued compliance actions for approximately 12% of the holders of firearms licenses each year.
Panorama in the United States
In 2024, there were more than 75 thousand firearms distributors with federal license regulated by ATF in the United States, including independent stores, store chains, pawn houses and manufacturers.
Many traffickers and holders of firearms licenses in the courts and the ATF tracking data sets are linked to crimes in the USs we mature almost 300 of the illegal weapons in these data sets with the licenses holders in the Demand Letter 2 ATF program, which tracks the holders of licenses that have sold 25 or more weapons within a year that recovered from a year. EU within three years of your sale.
A fifth of the companies included in the Demand program list in 2022 and 2023 were related to weapons used in crime in Mexico.
This coincidence suggests that the effects for weapons used in crime in Mexico, including a greater number of compliance controls that result in a lower sale of illicit weapons, also apply to the American illicit market.
*Sean Campbell He is a research journalist; Topher L. McDougal is a professor of economic development and consolidation of peace at the University of San Diego.
This article was originally published in The Conversation
