Talk:Smuggling of firearms into Mexico

the article starts off with (new) 70% US guns claim
US political figures heavily invested in their failed US Assault Weapon Ban (1994-2004) including Dennis Burke, Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer promote the claim that the majority of Mexican drug crime guns come from the US.

In response to a 2009 U.S. Government Accountability Office report that claimed 87% of Mexican crime gun traced to U.S. origins, the Department of Homeland Security pointed out that "DHS officials believe that the 87 percent statistic is misleading... (i.e., out of approximately 30,000 weapons siezed in Mexico, approximately 4,000 could be traced and 87 percent of those - 3,480 - originated in the United States. ... Numerous problems with the data collection and sample population render this assertion as unreliable."[1]

According to Congressional memo, ATF agents instruct Mexican authorities to submit for U.S. tracing only weapons that appear to be U.S. origin, since the ATF database contains mostly guns made in or legally imported into the U.S.[2] US ATF regulates US manufacturers and US import/export; it does not regulate or keep records on foreign makers who do not export to the US.

Of the superset of 30,000 guns siezed in 2004-2008, mentioned by GAO and DHS, the suspected U.S. origin subset was 7,200 (of which 4,000 were in ATF records with 3,480 of U.S. origin). The 22,800 not submitted for ATF tracing included Mexican military or police weapons, or weapons of apparent non-U.S. origin.[3]

Mexican Drug Crime Guns (2004-2008)
 * 30,000 total (100%)
 * 7,200 submitted for tracing as US origin (24%)
 * 4,000 successfully traced (13%)
 * 3,480 traced to US origin (12%)

The use of the 87% (or 90% or 70%) successful tracings of a subset against a total often uses the claim the subset of guns submitted for tracing is typical of the superset of guns siezed in total. You cannot apply the 87% percentage of guns traced to U.S. origin (3,480) of the subset of successfully traced guns (4,000) from the subset submitted for tracing (7,200) against the total (30,000 for 2004-2008), simply because the subset is not typical of the superset.

The first criterion for submission to U.S. ATF tracing is that the guns must appear to be U.S. origin, since the ATF database is mostly records on guns made in the U.S. or legally imported into the U.S. The majority of Mexican crime guns appear to be guns made in foreign countries that were never exported to the U.S. and are not submitted to ATF for tracing. In some cases tracing could prove embarassing to the government: a story in Mexico City newspaper El Universal, "They rent weapons to kill" 4 May 2010, said about the illegal gun market in Tepito Barrio: "A percentage of the weapons, the seller said, come from Mexico via Ministry of Defense personnel who provide [them] in part from weapons seized in raids, or stolen from the ministry's own arsenal."[4]

[1] http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09709.pdf United States Government Accountability Office, Report to Congressional Requesters, Firearms Trafficking, June 2009, Appendix III: Comments from the Department of Homeland Security. "

[2] http://www.grassley.senate.gov/judiciary/upload/Holder-11-08-11-DOJ-oversight-hearing-attachments-for-opening-statement.pdf Memo to Kenneth Melson, Acting Director ATF, from Senator Charles E. Grassley, 16 June 2011.

[3] Scott Stewart, "Mexico's Gun Supply and the 90 Percent Myth", STRATFOR Global Intelligence, 10 Feb 2011.

[4] http://mexidata.info/id2684.html Barnard R. Thompson, "An Inside Look at Mexican Guns and Arms Trafficking", Mexidata.Info, 31 May 2010.

---Naaman Brown (talk) 19:04, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

misquoted statsitics
the article states that

"During this 2010 review by the OIG, the ATF could not provide updated information on the percentage of traced Mexican crime guns that were sourced to (that is, found to be manufactured in or imported through) the United States,[18] and the November 2010 OIG analysis of ATF data suggest a much lower percentage, ranging from 27% to 44%.[22]"

This is completely wrong.

Most trace requests from Mexico have not been successful, and the success rate has declined since the start of Project Gunrunner. Deployment of eTrace is only one barrier to ATF’s successful development of intelligence through tracing of Mexican crime guns. Although requests from Mexico increased from FY 2005 through FY 2009, most traces were unsuccessful. Further, the success rate of Mexican crime gun trace requests has declined since the start of Project Gunrunner. As illustrated in Figure 8, in FY 2005, 44 percent (661 of 1,518) of Mexican crime gun traces were successful. The success rate fell to 27 percent (4,059 of 14,979 in FY 2007 and remained only at 31 percent (6,664 of 21,726) in FY 2009. Judderwocky (talk) 20:32, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

ATF has trace data on guns legally manufactured in the US or legally imported into the US. A decline in the proportion of successful tracings to US sources is evidence that Project Gunrunner (interdiction of straw purchasers for the cartels in the US esp. CA, AZ, NM and TX) curtailed cartel acquisitions of firearms in the US (outside of abberations like Operation Wide Receiver and Operation Fast and Furious, where for whatever reason identified straw purchasers were not interdicted). Most tracing requests received from Mexico were unsuccessful because most Mexican crime guns didn't come from the US--a source for some but not the only for most. Illegal sources from other countries were more than happy to take up any slack caused by Project Gunrunner. -- Naaman Brown (talk) 14:20, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

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Scholarly source
It's directly relevant. Felsic2 (talk) 20:11, 24 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Dube, Arindrajit, Oeindrila Dube and Omar Garcia-Ponce (2013). "Cross-Border Spillover: U.S. Gun Laws and Violence in Mexico." American Political Science Review, 107, pp 397-417. doi:10.1017/S0003055413000178

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