PHOENIX — Mexico's lawsuit against five Arizona gun stores claiming the stores assisted in gun trafficking to Mexico is moving forward into the discovery phase. The gun stores have aggressively denied the allegations.
This comes as a massive data leak of Mexican military data, reported on by USA Today and published by researcher John Lindsay-Poland, reveals how many guns seized from Mexican crime scenes and cartels are traced back to the United States.
The data shows from 2018 to 2020, nearly 17,000 guns were traced to the U.S. and 1,126 of those guns came from Arizona. About half of the guns came from Phoenix and Tucson but they came from every corner of the state.
'Firearms and cash flow south into Mexico. Drugs and violence flow north.'
Bernard Zapor, a retired ATF Special Agent in Charge and faculty associate at ASU, said this has been a problem for decades.
"They come from regular firearms dealers, they go into the hands of people that are involved in trafficking, they make it into Mexico and they result in death," Zapor said. "There isn't really a distinct law to stop this or prevent it and so it makes it very difficult."
Mexico has only two gun stores in the country and it takes months to get approved to purchase one, which is why members of the cartel often pay Americans a hefty amount to legally purchase firearms in the U.S. and then pass them off.
It is known as straw purchasing and it is illegal. ATF defines a straw purchase as the illegal buying of a gun by an individual, a “straw buyer,” on behalf of a person prevented from legally purchasing a firearm.
But Zapor said it's not the gun stores that are to blame.
“The Federal Firearms Licensees don't have culpability in this," Zapor said. "It's the weakness of our laws that allow this to happen.”
Zapor said there are few ATF special agents which makes it a challenge to crack down on these incidents. He also said the U.S. lacks a specific trafficking statute that would be effective for enforcement and prevention.
"To do this type of work with firearms trafficking, you might be dealing with people that are in the straw purchase and the smuggling business that have no criminal history because they have to be clean of that in order to participate and buy the firearms. So I think unfortunately, politically, people have been put under the illusion that there's some kind of dragnet that stops this from happening," Zapor said.
While much of the focus at the southern border is what's coming into Arizona, what's coming out is part of the problem, too.
“Firearms and cash flow south into Mexico. Drugs and violence flow north," Zapor said. "It's incredibly dangerous for the U.S. and public safety for this to be happening there."
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