Guns and a global black market

By Fester:

The crew at the Newshoggers has long argued that most weapons in Iraq were from either abandoned depots or the result of a global search for profits. Massive black market arms flows supply all sides and sometimes multiple sides of the conflict off the same shipping lot.  Mafias,organized crime,smugglers and enterprising businessmen were trying to supply people with lots of minimally traceable cash with something that they desired.  This explanation has a whole lot more verified explanatory power than the supposition that all guerrilla arms were coming from established nation states with high level approval and planning. 

So when Fox reports that most weapons in Mexico are not being traced back to the US, that is believable:

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 interviews multiple people who report that there is a massive black market for high powered weapons.  And given what we know about Iraq and any other conflict zone where at least one side has a lot of cash and wants weapons, that is eminently believable. 

Comments

[Russ Wellen]

Shouldn't that read:

83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S

but. . .

68 percent of the guns that were recovered [and] were never submitted for tracing

. . . might have been traced to the U.S. were they submitted?

Or am I missing something?

[fester]

Either sentence would be correct, Russ -- but I don't have a problem conceding a large global black market in arms, including a significant but perhaps not overwhelming US component to it.