Crackdown On Smuggled Guns Hindered By U.S. Laws

SCOTT SIMON, host:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon.

For years now, Mexican drug traffickers have used gun stores and gun shows in U.S. border states as what amounts to their weapons supermarkets. In April, Mexican President Felipe Calderon met with President Obama and asked the U.S. to do more to curb the flow of weapons smuggled in Mexico.

As NPR's John Burnett reports, the crackdown has begun, but it's hindered by the liberal U.S. gun laws.

JOHN BURNETT: It's one of the curious realities of geography that the world's most murderous drug mafias operate on a border with a country that has the most permissive gun laws in the developed world. Last November, law enforcement in Reynosa, just across the Rio Grande from Hidalgo, Texas, made this astonishing find.

It's recounted by Victor Trevino, the Mexican consul in Brownsville.

Mr. VICTOR TREVINO (Mexican Consul): Five hundred thousand rounds of ammunition, 300 assault rifles - mainly AK-47 and AR-15, two grenades launchers and 297 grenades. That just in a single seizure in Reynosa, Tamaulipas.

BURNETT: None of these weapons has been traced yet, but a report released last month by the Government Accountability Office, based on ATF traces of crime guns recovered in Mexico in 2008, states that nearly 90 percent originated in the United States. The report acknowledges the data are incomplete because Mexico doesn't submit all of its confiscated weapons for electronic tracing.

The report's authors also criticized U.S. federal law enforcement for the lack of a coherent campaign against weapons trafficking. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives - the ATF - is trying to do something about that now. They've created gun runner task forces in Houston and South Texas, and the airwaves reflect that new focus.

(Soundbite of public service announcement)

Unidentified Man: If you try to purchase a gun for someone who can't, you can buy yourself 10 years in jail.

BURNETT: The way it works, drug traffickers pay U.S. residents who don't have criminal records to buy the guns for them, then they smuggle the weapons across the border to Mexico. It's called a straw purchase.

Mr. DEWEY WEBB (ATF): We typically will see a straw purchaser go from gun shop to gun shop on the same day and be paid $50 a gun sometimes, buy 10 different guns, make $500 in one day.

BURNETT: Dewey Webb is the special agent in charge of the Houston ATF field office. Relaxed reporting requirements for arms purchases make it difficult for his agents. For instance, if you buy two handguns within five days, the dealer must report it to the ATF. But you can buy all the rifles you want, and the dealer doesn't have to report it.

Then there's ammunition. Remember: Guns don't kill people, bullets do. Ammo is not just untraceable, Webb says; it's virtually unregulated.

Mr. WEBB: You could go into any place that sells ammunition, be it a gun store or - I mean, even some gas stations and bait shops sell ammunition. And you just buy as much as you want.

BURNETT: In a 2006 case, two Mexican nationals walked into Kirkpatrick Guns and Ammo in Laredo, bought 12,570 rounds of assorted ammunition, and got caught only when an off-duty ATF agent walked in and arrested them after he learned they were not U.S. citizens.

Gun dealers in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas are defensive that they're somehow contributing to the cartel war. Chuck Fredien, a longtime gun dealer and gunsmith in Brownsville, says if he suspects a customer is buying a weapon for somebody else, he won't sell it to them.

Mr. CHUCK FREDIEN (Gun Dealer, Gunsmith): We go through and check everything that's supposed to be done by the letter, and that's all we can do. I mean, I don't have a crystal ball to look into and see if this guy's legitimate or not.

BURNETT: Second Amendment defenders, like the National Rifle Association, have seized on the ATF's incomplete Mexican tracing data, and asserted that many illegal weapons seized in Mexico could be coming from the international arms market. Grenades and grenade launchers, for instance, are not sold by U.S. gun dealers, but they are available on the black market from Central America.

Ed Jones, a gunsmith in Chuck Fredien's store, says it seems to him the cartels have limitless resources.

Mr. ED JONES (Gunsmith): They have the money. They can buy weapons anywhere in the world. They don't have to buy them secondhand off of the United States.

BURNETT: The ATF is using its additional agents in border states to investigate more gun trafficking cases and make house calls on buyers of multiple weapons to see if they're legit.

But the problem, says Tom Diaz of the Violence Policy Center, a Washington gun control group, is that once the purchases are made, the horse is out of the barn, as it were.

Mr. TOM DIAZ (Violence Policy Center): It's really asking a bit too much just to ask ATF, through its resources, to stop a problem that really is a systemic problem springing from our wide-open civilian gun market.

BURNETT: Mexico has asked Washington not just to pursue gun traffickers on the border but to change the laws. So far, the Obama administration has shown little interest in taking on the gun lobby to tighten the nation's firearms sales laws.

John Burnett, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.