Dave Hardy has some great thoughts on the whole topic, noting that the total number of firearms the Mexican government are holding that were seized is far greater than the number of firearms the Mexican government has submitted to the ATF for tracing.
Another thought I had recently is how do we trust all these guns are recovered from actual narco-traffickers, and not recovered from ordinary non-criminal citizens who smuggled, or had a relative smuggle, a firearm back from the United States to protect themselves and their families. Guns are generally unavailable to anyone other than criminals in Mexico.
That’s not the kind of smuggling I’m interested in stopping. As far as I’m concerned, the Mexican government is interfering with a fundamental human right, and I consider guns smuggled for such a purpose no morally different than people who smuggled Jews out of Nazi Germany. That’s not to say we know guns smuggled into Mexico are used for that purpose, but it’s something to think about.
Or for a more direct comparison (especially considering the current state of the Mexican drug war), guns smuggled into France during the German occupation.
Probably a more direct analogy, yes. What I meant to suggest is that neither are morally problematic, even though both are technically against the law.
I’ve seen articles from people who have been in Mexico during holidays suggesting that guns are far more common in Mexico than people think. It sounded a lot more like Baghdad than he was expecting.