At Last, a Border Crackdown
After nearly two years of foot-dragging while the death toll in the Mexican drug wars rose beyond 30,000, the Obama administration is finally stepping up the fight against the easy movement of illegal guns across the United States’ border with Mexico and into the hands of violent drug cartels.
This has long been an open scandal. An analysis of government gun-trace data by the coalition Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that many thousands of guns recovered from Mexican crime scenes and traced between 2006 and 2009 were originally sold by American gun dealers. According to a recent investigation by The Washington Post, eight of the top 10 dealers in Mexican crime guns have shops near the border.
To stem this deadly flow, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is seeking emergency authority to require gun dealers near the border to report multiple purchases of the high-firepower rifles favored by cartel gunmen.