by Matthew Johnson

Created on: April 23, 2009   Last Updated: May 12, 2009

With the drug wars in Mexico getting more and more difficult to win, and the claims that Mexico is getting over 90% of its firearms from the United states, there has been a lot of discussion as to whether an assault weapons ban similar to the one enacted during the Clinton administration should be brought into play. To properly answer that question we should first look at the facts as they are, not as they are commonly portrayed in the media.

The 90% statistic stated on many of the news shows and in newspapers is deceptive. What it actually states is that 90% of the firearms sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) that are able to be traced are, in fact, traced to the United States. What this statistic fails to mention is that a large percentage of the weapons recovered by the Mexican Government are not sent to the BATFE for tracing because they either possess markings that make it obvious that the weapons do not originate in the United States or they do not have the markings necessary in order to do an accurate trace, such as a weapon with the serial numbers filed off or missing completely.

In 2007 and 2008, according to the Mexican government, approximately 29,000 guns were recovered at various crime scenes. Of these guns, according to BATFE officials, approximately 11,000 firearms were sent to the BATFE for tracing and identification. Of these 11,000 firearms, approximately 6,000 were successfully traced and of those 6,000, BATFE Assistant Director for Field Operations William Hoover testified to Congress that 5,114, or roughly 90%, were traced to the United States.

If we were to convert these numbers to a percentage scale, it would say that of all the guns recovered in Mexico, roughly 68% were never sent to the US for tracing and of the 32% sent here, less than half of those were eventually traced to have US origin. That all boils down to over 80% of the firearms recovered in Mexico in 2007 and 2008 having origins of somewhere other than the United States.

With those statistics now available, the question becomes, "Where is Mexico getting the all of those guns if not from the United States?", and the short answer to that question is the black market. The black market is filled with weapons from Central and South America, China, South Korea and many former Soviet Bloc manufacturers. These weapons include fully automatic rifles, heavy machine guns, grenades, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other explosives that can't

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