Where do the Mexican drug lords really get their guns?

Mexico's Gun Supply and the 90 Percent Myth

It has now become quite common to hear U.S. officials confidently assert that 90 percent of the weapons used by the Mexican drug cartels come from the United States. However, a close examination of the dynamics of the cartel wars in Mexico — and of how the oft-echoed 90 percent number was reached — clearly demonstrates that the number is more political rhetoric than empirical fact.

Politicians love to claim that the United States is the primary gun supplier of the Mexican drug cartels. Of course, this is likely only true if you count all of the guns that the United States government has distributed to corrupt authoritarian regimes over the decades, with those guns making their way from corrupt officials onto the black market and into the hands of the rich drug barons who need ever-increasing firepower to protect their trade.

Of course, the source of this figure is that that ATF was given thousands of guns to trace, and of those successfully traced, approximately 90% were traced to the US. But why submit guns to the ATF for tracing if there aren't indications that they come from the US? So, the 80% of seized guns that are not traced are hard to account for. You have to assume that they are not submitted because there isn't an indication that they could be traced. After all, you don't submit thousands of guns for tracing to conduct a statistical study (you certainly wouldn't need that large of a sample size), they're submitted to aid in investigations. If submitting gun serial numbers to the ATF would be a waste of time, they won't be sent.

Inclinations to use this "iron river of guns" flowing into Mexico to put stricter requirements on gun shows and stricter reporting requirements on gun dealers is just a ruse to soften them up for more and more intrusions until finally there's a huge unwieldy registry that can be used to go after undesirables. Laws are often simply tools to be used by the powerful against those who might upset the balance. Simply outlaw everything so that everyone is a federal criminal, then you can just make an example of those who speak out too much to make everyone else fall in line.