Don’t shield U.S. companies from liability for Mexico’s gun violence
If it weren’t for U.S. gun companies supplying a steady stream of weapons for Mexico’s criminal organizations, my then-16-year-old cousin Diego might not have been kidnapped in 2015. His mother, Veronica Rosas Valenzuela, might not be sifting through sewage searching for him.
Mexico would be a radically different country, without the grief and rampant terror of gun violence.
With one gun store and fewer than 50 gun permits granted a year, Mexico has some of the strictest gun laws in the world. Between 70% and 90% of guns found at crime scenes in Mexico come from the U.S.
The Mexican government filed a lawsuit against several U.S. gun companies, accusing them of knowingly flooding the country with illicit firearms.
In a brief filed on Nov. 22, the gun companies asked a federal judge in Boston to dismiss the lawsuit. The companies — Smith & Wesson, Glock, Ruger & Co. and others — postured as the good guys, invoking stereotypes of Mexico as a lawless place.
Marcela Celorio, Mexico’s consul general in Los Angeles, said this lawsuit has nothing to do with the Second Amendment. “This is against the gun companies,” she told me. “We would like the federal courts to hold them accountable for all these negligent commercial practices that have actively facilitated unlawful trafficking of their guns into Mexico.”
Mexico is seeking billions of dollars in damages and demanding that the gun manufacturers adopt new sales and marketing practices, including smart-gun technology to prevent unauthorized use.
The complaint describes the weapons that appeal to drug cartels: pistols such as Colt’s “El Jefe” (The Boss) and “El Grito” (The Scream), as well as Barrett’s .50-caliber sniper rifle marketed as “battle proven” — used to shoot down helicopters and penetrate armored vehicles in Mexico.
One University of San Diego study found that 47% of licensed gun dealers in the U.S. would go out of business without Mexico’s demand for trafficked guns. David Shirk, the study’s co-author, said Mexico’s lawsuit could be a turning point because it comes amid other lawsuits, including from families of children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting.
Most of the increase in licensed gun dealers in the last decade has been in border states. The complaint estimates that between 342,000 and 597,000 of the defendants’ guns are trafficked into Mexico annually.
My cousin Veronica’s life has become a relentless search for Diego across Mexico. A suspect in the teenager’s kidnapping posted a photo on Facebook in 2015 of an assault rifle and ammunition spelling out his own name, and another of two pistols under a baseball cap reading “Dope.” Other photos show the suspect’s love of U.S. gun culture and Mafia films.
John Lindsay-Poland, coordinator of Stop U.S. Arms to Mexico,
said the harm of U.S. gun culture visited on Mexico is immense. As he points out, there are more gun homicides in Mexico than in the U.S., since most gun deaths in the U.S. are from suicides.
Mexico’s suit will face a daunting legal path. The federal law called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act largely protects gun manufacturers and dealers from liability when their products injure people. But Mexico’s lawyers argue it doesn’t apply in this case, citing a Supreme Court case that says the “default rule for tort cases” where actions in one country cause injury in another is that the law of the place where the injury occurs applies.
Steve Shadowen, a lawyer for the Mexican government, is confident the federal liability shield won’t bar the case. “Once we get past that, then our case is as close to a slam-dunk as you’re going to get,” he said.
Meanwhile, there are steps U.S. officials can take to reduce gun trafficking into Mexico. Ioan Grillo, author of “Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels,” argues that universal background checks — which 84% of Americans support — and prison sentences for straw purchasers could save countless lives. “There’s not even a basic effort to stop this,” he told me. These failures show just how complicit Americans are in Mexico’s tragedy.