Study: A Quarter Million US Guns are Smuggled into Mexico Every Year Tim Johnson - McClatchy Newspapers
go to original March 19, 2013

The Mexican government is asking the U.S. government to hand over a list of all guns owned by residents in Border States. (x4167)

MEXICO CITY - Some 2.2 percent of all US gun sales are made to smuggling rings that take firearms to Mexico, a scale of illegal trafficking that’s “much higher than widely assumed,” an academic study released Monday found.

An average of 253,000 weapons purchased in the United States head south of the border each year, according to the study by four scholars at the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute and the Igarape Institute, a research center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Profit margins at many gun stores are razor thin, and thousands of US gun vendors would go out of business without the illicit traffic to Mexico, said Topher McDougal, an economist educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who’s one of the study’s authors.

The study’s conclusions are likely to add to controversy over what role US weapons smugglers play in Mexico’s drug violence. Mexican officials have long blamed lax gun laws in the United States for the availability of weapons in Mexico, which has only one gun store and considers gun ownership a privilege, not a right.

Read the rest at The Christian Science Monitor

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