Newsweek is now pushing the familiar “Mexico drug violence is the fault of US gun owners” canard. I was going to publish this response there, but they have a 3000 character limit on their comments. Here is the pre-edit version of my comment, which I thought I was already brief. C’est l’Internet.
Another article blaming violence in Mexico on lax gun laws in the US. Here’s the problem: Mexican drug cartels are using automatic weapons, not semi-automatics. Why does it matter? Because automatics have been heavily regulated in the US since the passage of the National Firearms Act of 1934 and were further restricted by the Gun Control Act of 1986. It is very difficult for a normal US citizen to get an automatic weapon; you can’t just go down to the gun show and pick one up. Among other considerations, such weapons MUST be registered with the Federal Government and the prospective owner is fingerprinted, photographed, and subjected to a months-long background check. The 1994 “Assault Weapons Ban” did NOT affect automatic weapons at all! They are already tightly controlled.
On the other hand, semi-automatics are easier to come by, and some of them even look like military weapons. Semi-autos are among the most popular weapons in the United States and are NOT the weapons used by Mexican drug lords. These weapons are used by Americans in the most popular sport shooting games in the nation, as well as for personal protection and for hunting. Despite their looks, they are not modern military weapons and do not function like modern fully-automatic weapons.
The 1994 AWB banned certain semi-automatic weapons based purely on largely cosmetic features such as barrel shrouds, folding stocks, pistol grips, and bayonet lugs. These are the features that we were told increase the lethality of these weapons, which is completely untrue. Also affected by the ban were standard-capacity magazines for semi-automatic weapons. Magazines manufactured during the ban had to hold 10 rounds or less. This too, we were told, would reduce the lethality of the weapons. To put a lie to that statement, the deranged shooter at Virginia Tech used 10 round magazines for his pistol which were legal during the ban. He changed magazines more nearly 20 times and fired more than 170 rounds. Magazine restrictions do not reduce lethality.
What, then, was the effect of the 1994 AWB? According to a report commissioned by the FBI (“An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003″) at the end of the ban, almost nothing for Americans, and absolutely nothing for Mexicans. The report states: “Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. [Assault Weapons]s were rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban.” Before the ban, the affected weapons were used in less than 2% of all gun crime. These weapons are not any sort of clear and present danger to our safety.
The only source for the figure of “90 percent of the assault weapons and other guns used by Mexican drug cartels are coming from the United States” is the Mexican government itself. When pressed, the Mexican government has refused to provide any serial numbers or other evidence that the weapons they have seized originated in the US. Since the weapons are largely automatics, a more likely source for the weapons would be the Mexican military, which has an astonishingly high desertion rate, or weapons manufacturers from south of Mexico’s border.
Newsweek, please do your homework instead of publishing such a poorly researched article.