fresh air

How Thousands Of US Guns Fuel Crime In Mexico

In the past four years, more than 30,000 people have been killed by gunfire in Mexico. But the guns don't originate in Mexico. The one gun store in the country, located in Mexico City, is operated by the Mexican military and under very tight security.

Instead, the thousands of guns used by Mexican drug cartels trickle in through the United States. Since 2006, more than 60,000 of the weapons used in Mexican crimes have been traced back to the U.S.

For the past year, Washington Post reporter James Grimaldi and a team of Post reporters have been investigating the hidden life of guns, including how guns from the United States have ended up on Mexican streets. He says it's not surprising that the vast majority of weapons used in Mexico can be traced back across the border.

"We're the closest country, it's easy to get guns, it's not difficult to cross the borders with the guns when you get them, and there's very little stopping gun runners from doing that," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "The efforts by the United States and Mexican authorities have not really been a very strong deterrent in stopping the flow of guns south of the border."

Part of the problem, Grimaldi says, is straw-purchasing: when legal buyers purchase guns on behalf of illegal buyers, who remain largely untraceable.

"What is happening is dozens if not hundreds of people are going into gun stores along the border, buying guns for this trafficking and then taking them across the border," Grimaldi explains. "Those straw purchases really put the gun stores in the front lines of defending or preventing this flow of guns to Mexico."

But which U.S. dealers sell guns taken from Mexican crime scenes remains largely unknown. Though the information used to be freely available to anyone who filed a Freedom of Information Act request, the 2003 Tiahrt Amendment passed by Congress prohibits the ATF from releasing gun tracing data.

"The gun lobby — the National Rifle Assocation and gun manufacturers — went to Congress and asked them to [make gun tracing] off-limits," Grimaldi says. "It basically shut down any news stories that had been published in the past exposing where the guns were coming from — showing which stores tended to be the ones that criminals went to buy their guns. It [also] took the focus off of those stores that were engaged either knowingly or unwittingly in gun trafficking to criminals."

But Grimaldi and other Washington Post reporters managed to break the secrecy....

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