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By JULIÁN AGUILAR | NY Times
Published: January 19, 2013

In the recent debate about stricter gun control, some Mexican and American officials saw a sliver of hope — that such laws might curb the flow of illegal weapons over the United States’ southern border.



Reuters - Guns found in a southbound vehicle at the Del Rio bridge.

“I hope that whatever we are going to do in trying to protect our gun rights but at the same time regulate the legal ownership of weapons is going to have a component on guns that are being smuggled out of the country so easily now and causing the carnage,” said Alonzo Peña, the former deputy director of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement who has also served as a Department of Homeland Security attaché at the United States Embassy in Mexico City.

But the national debate, coupled with the Obama administration’s proposals to tighten gun laws, has only fortified the ranks of Second Amendment proponents in Texas, who say the border states that are a main source for weapons in Mexico’s drug war are not responsible for the thousands of murders in that country since 2006.

After President Obama called last week for more background checks on potential gun purchasers and a ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, Republican lawmakers immediately rebuked the White House’s efforts. Texas state lawmakers have already pushed proposals that would permit college students to carry weapons on campus and that would also open the door for gun-carrying marshals at primary schools.

Attorney General Greg Abbott last week threatened Travis County and the City of Austin with a “double-barreled” lawsuit when they considered banning gun shows on public property, and Gov. Rick Perry has said the country’s Democratic leadership is using the slaughter of innocent children as a political pawn.

“The piling on by the political left, and their cohorts in the media, to use the massacre of little children to advance a pre-existing political agenda that would not have saved those children, disgusts me personally,” Mr. Perry said in a statement on Wednesday.

Other Texas Republicans dismissed the notion that it was time to re-evaluate what role the United States plays in the carnage in Mexico, where more than 70,000 people have been killed in cartel-related violence since former President Felipe Calderón declared war on organized crime in December 2006.

A December 2012 report from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives showed that more than 68,160 of the approximately 99,700 weapons recovered in Mexico and submitted for tracing between 2007 and 2011 had originated in the United States.

But United States Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Austin and the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said the data were misleading and that changing gun laws in the United States would not change gun behavior in Mexico.

“The fact is, guns are illegal to possess in Mexico,” Mr. McCaul said, “and that certainly hasn’t had any effects on the drug cartels.”

He said he understood that the debate was fueled by emotion, which he said was inevitable after years of bloodshed in Mexico and the murder of 20 schoolchildren in Connecticut. But he also said the public was not aware that many of the weapons favored by cartels like the Zetas came from other countries and were often not traceable, which inevitably led to data that reflected poorly on the United States.

“We all feel for what happened recently with the shooting in a very emotional way, but the fact is a lot of their AK-47s, which is the Zetas’ gun of choice, those are coming from China and Russia,” Mr. McCaul said. “We could make guns in the United States illegal altogether, and I don’t think it’s going to stop the drug cartels from getting weapons.”

Gun-control proponents who link the United States’ gun laws to violence in Mexico have drawn attention to what they call the gun-show loophole, which allows many dealers to sell firearms without conducting background checks. Critics call it a significant flaw that allows weapons to fall into the wrong hands, and law enforcement officers say it has aided the illegal smuggling of weapons into Mexico.

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