90% of guns in Mexican drug war come from US… or not

Yesterday I had written this in a post about Mexican officials seeking Asylum in the US:

How tragic – we fund the Mexican cartels because we prohibit a plant that Americans demand, then we supply 90% of the firearms and ammunition the cartels use to terrorize police, but when the police run to us in fear for their lives, we won’t grant them asylum.

Which got me a prompt email from Stasher Tom:

You stated that the US supplies 90% of the firearms to the Mexican cartels, this is not true.  The US at the most supplies 33% and as little as 14% of the firearms used by the cartels. Russ please retract this misstatement, please do not muddy this movement for liberty with unevaluated quotes from anti-gun groups.

And I thought, hold on, I’m usually really careful with the numbers.  Did I unknowingly slip up?  I don’t recall gathering quotes from the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence or any other “anti-gun” group.  I’m actually quite a fan of guns and the 2nd Amendment (it’s that Idaho DNA – where I’m from, “gun control” means “use both hands”), even though I think we do a poor job keeping them out of the hands of the violent and mentally ill and our culture has a huge defect revealed in our love for shooting each other (according to the CDC, the ratio of US gun homicides to International gun homicides is 15.7:1)

So what’s the truth and what led your intrepid reporter to the “90%” quote?  Read on…First of all, there was February story from the New York Times entitled “U.S. Is Arms Bazaar for Mexican Cartels” where I think I first picked up on this theme:

George Iknadosian, will go on trial on charges he sold hundreds of weapons, mostly AK-47 rifles, to smugglers, knowing they would send them to a drug cartel in the western state of Sinaloa.

Mexican authorities have long complained that American gun dealers are arming the cartels.

Drug gangs seek out guns in the United States because the gun-control laws are far tougher in Mexico.

What is more, the sheer volume of licensed dealers — more than 6,600 along the border alone, many of them operating out of their houses — makes policing them a tall order. Currently the A.T.F. has about 200 agents assigned to the task.

The Mexican authorities say they seized 20,000 weapons from drug gangs in 2008, the majority bought in the United States.

In 2007, the firearms agency traced 2,400 weapons seized in Mexico back to dealers in the United States, and 1,800 of those came from dealers operating in the four states along the border, with Texas first, followed by California, Arizona and New Mexico.

Over the two years leading up to his arrest last May, he sold more than 700 weapons of the kind currently sought by drug dealers in Mexico, including 515 AK-47 rifles and one .50 caliber rifle that can penetrate an engine block or bulletproof glass, the A.T.F. said.

In March, we then get a joint statement to Congress from the ATF and DEA that gives us the money quote:

Because firearms are not readily available in Mexico, drug traffickers have aggressively turned to the U.S. as their primary source. Firearms are routinely being transported from the U.S. into Mexico in violation of both U.S. and Mexican law. In fact, according to ATF’s National Tracing Center, 90 percent of the weapons that could be traced were determined to have originated from various sources within the U.S.

This figure is pretty damning, but notice the caveat “that could be traced“.  Not all weapons are traceable, and not all weapons were turned into the tracing center.  This little detail got left out as the “90 percent” figure made the rounds.  In fact, the hearing with the ATF and DEA wasn’t even gaveled closed before Sen. Dick Durbin and Sen. Dianne Feinstein were ignoring the detail (thanks, FactCheck.org):

SEN. DURBIN: ”According to ATF [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives], more than 90 percent of the guns seized after raids or shootings in Mexico have been traced right here to the United States of America.”

SEN. FEINSTEIN: ”It is unacceptable to have 90 percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico used to shoot judges, police officers, mayors, kidnap innocent people and do terrible things come from the United States, and I think we must put a stop to that.”

The politicians and the news media then repeat the claim.  On March 26, Secretary of State Clinton was on the CBS Early Show and said:

“We have to recognize and accept that the demand for drugs from the United States drives them north, and the guns that are used by the drug cartels against the police and the military, 90 percent of them come from America.“

President Obama mentioned it during a press conference with the Mexican President on April 16:

“A demand for these drugs in the United States is what is helping to keep these cartels in business. This war is being waged with guns purchased not here, but in the United States. More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border.”

The news media repeated the claim, including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, CNN, NBC, and others.  Then Reuters printed “Mexico cartels go bargain gun shopping in Houston” at the end of May, which at least bothered to add the important detail:

Mexican drug gangs looking for weapons powerful enough to stop a vehicle, penetrate a bullet-resistant vest or confront an army detachment need look no further than the Houston area’s 1,500 gun shops, where merchandise is priced to move.

Guns like the Barrett M-82 sniper rifle, the AK-47 and Bushmaster .223 are among those favoured by cartel hitmen that slaughtered some 6,300 people in Mexico border cities like Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana last year.

For example, the Belgian-made FN 5.7-calibre pistol is known to gangs as a “cop killer” because it can fire a round through a Kevlar bullet-resistant vest. It goes for $800 in the Houston area, compared to $1,500 in a border store, Webb said.

According to ATF gun-tracing data, 90 percent of the traceable weapons used in Mexican drug violence originated in the United States with Texas, Arizona and California the largest suppliers.

So the detail that’s important – guns that were submitted for tracing and could be traced – needs to be considered in light of all the guns, traceable and untraceable, submitted or not, that are seized in Mexico’s drug war.  FOX News decided to look at that and decided that the US share of Mexican drug war guns was 17%, not 90%:

There’s just one problem with the 90 percent “statistic” and it’s a big one:

It’s just not true.

In fact, it’s not even close. The fact is, only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the U.S.

In 2007-2008, according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Close to 6,000 were successfully traced — and of those, 90 percent — 5,114 to be exact, according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover — were found to have come from the U.S.

But in those same two years, according to the Mexican government, 29,000 guns were recovered at crime scenes.

In other words, 68 percent of the guns that were recovered were never submitted for tracing. And when you weed out the roughly 6,000 guns that could not be traced from the remaining 32 percent, it means 83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S.

FOX goes on to explain how guns come from illicit sources like China, Russian gangs, South American drug cartels, and the Mexican Army itself when its deserters took their firearms with them.

However, FOX is playing a little fast and loose with the details as well (and I am shocked, d’ya hear, shocked!)  In the Newell testimony FOX cited, he mentions 11,055 guns submitted in those two fiscal years of 2007-2008:

We can report that our efforts are paying off. Mexico has increased the number of firearms it has submitted for tracing from 3,312 in FY 2007, to 7,743 in FY 2008…

In fact, 90% of the firearms recovered in Mexico, and which are then successfully traced, were determined to have originated from various sources within the continental U.S.

Where FOX goes wrong is saying that “Close to 6,000 were successfully traced”.  This is a reference to the guns that could be directly traced to a specific US state.  When contacted by FactCheck.org, ATF reiterated that over 90% of the guns that were turned in for tracing could be traced back to the United States:

At our request, an ATF spokesman gave us more detailed figures for how many guns had been submitted and traced during those two years. Of the guns seized in Mexico and given to ATF for tracing, the agency actually found 95 percent came from U.S. sources in fiscal 2007 and 93 percent in fiscal 2008. That comes to a total of 10,347 guns from U.S. sources for those two years, or 36 percent of what Mexican authorities say they recovered.

So what we have here is this:  Mexican authorities seize 29,000 guns in the drug war.  11,055 of those guns are turned into ATF, 10,347 come from the US = 93.6% of Mexican drug war guns turned into the ATF come from USA. This leaves roughly 18,000 guns that are not turned into the ATF.  Now you might assume that Mexico only turns in obviously American guns to ATF for tracing, but this has not been confirmed.  How many of the remaining 18,000 guns came from the US is not known, but I’m willing to bet it is a non-zero number.

It’s a slippery stat, since we don’t really know exactly how many guns the Mexicans seize, we don’t know what guns the Mexican cartels still hold and where they came from, and we don’t know if the guns seized are an accurate representative sample of all Mexican drug war guns.  What we do know is that when our officials examine a sample of 38% of all seized guns, 93.9% of them come from America.  We do know that at the very least, 35.7% of all guns seized in the Mexican drug war are from the US, with an unknown number of the remaining 62% of unexamined guns coming from the US.  If even one out of four of the unexamined guns comes from the US, a fair estimate, I think, if over nine in ten examined guns are American, then over half of all Mexican drug war guns come from the US.

No matter how you slice it, the Mexican drug cartels are getting a large portion of their guns – at least one out of three and maybe half – from the United States.  I don’t present that as a “pro-gun” or “anti-gun” position; I present it to rebut the politicians’ and media’s 90% claim and FOX’s and the NRA’s 17% claim.