Two Way Road

We hear a lot about the flow of dangerous drugs from Mexico to the United States. We hear a lot less about the flow of something even more dangerous going in the opposite direction. And the numbers are staggering. The Conversation: Mexican drug cartels use hundreds of thousands of guns bought from licensed US gun shops – fueling violence in Mexico, drugs in the US and migration at the border. “To estimate weapons flow, we gathered trafficking estimates and combined them with previous research, firearm manufacturing totals and the ATF trace data. We generated a model that arrived at a conservative middle estimate: About 135,000 firearms were trafficked across the border in 2022. By way of comparison, consider that Ukraine, engaged in a war with Russia, received 40,000 small arms from the United States between January 2020 and April 2024 – an average of 9,000 per year. That is just under 7% of the trafficked firearms flow that our model showed from the U.S. to Mexico.”