Kansas City gun lawsuit will take money out of the Mexican drug cartels’ hands

On Jan. 7, the city of Kansas City filed a lawsuit against local weapons dealers and an out-of-state firearm manufacturer after reviewing evidence of a gun trafficking ring that operated from 2014 through 2019. This criminal enterprise funneled at least 77 firearms into the city through a single purchaser, Jimenez Arms.

The impact of these straw-purchased firearms spreads wide. Their costs were not only monetary for law enforcement and victim support programs, but also in the loss of lives to homicide during these past five years. The lawsuit documents how the Kansas City Police Department recovered, seized or held as evidence at least 166 firearms from the manufacturer.

Now imagine the same gun trafficking scheme happening not to a city, but to an entire country — and not only with handguns, but with assault rifles and military-grade weapons. This is exactly what is occurring today in Mexico with gun trafficking from the U.S. And instead of a single gun manufacturer failing to do its part by following existing regulations on gun sales — some as elemental as basic record-keeping — there are hundreds of armories all across the U.S. continuously supplying organized crime in Mexico, including its drug cartels.

The lawsuit filed by Kansas City is a perfect example of a larger conversation that Mexico will be promoting this year with our American counterparts about the role that U.S. cities and states can play to help reduce gun violence in both countries. Our main intention is to create awareness about a harsh reality: When U.S. gun retailers fail to ensure that their merchandise is legitimately acquired, entire cities are torn apart by violence — as Kansas City has learned.

As documented in the lawsuit, more than 95% of the homicides in Kansas City are handgun-related. In Mexico, only 15% of homicides involved a firearm in 1997. That figure rose to 69% in 2018.

Perhaps the most important reality described in the lawsuit is that both traffickers and gun shops were aware of the straw purchases being made by third parties intending to harm others. Yet law enforcement was never properly informed — almost certainly because of the income the trafficking generated for its accomplices. This dynamic was purely economic, and has little to nothing to do with rights enshrined in the U. S. Constitution.

If you project the incentives generated by a local gun trafficking ring to a nationwide scale, with illicit weapons flowing south of the border to Mexican cartels willing to pay in cash, then you have a perfect public safety nightmare. A cooperative approach and vigorous, constructive dialogue between Mexico and the United States about public policy are urgently needed.

Between 2012 and 2019, Mexico was able to trace more than 130,000 firearms unlawfully present in the country. Of those 130,000, about half were traced back to the U.S., including to Wyandotte County, Kansas, and Jackson County, Missouri. And even though only 20% of the guns traced back to the U.S. were manufactured in America, 87% of the European-made firearms illicitly in Mexico passed through a distributor in the U.S.

Why is this discussion in the interest of the American public? Because if the illicit flow of weapons from the U.S. to Mexico is reduced through actions like those Kansas City has taken, criminal organizations would have less money to operate with. Thus, the continuous supply of illegal drugs — opioids included — would be hamstrung.

Mexico’s approach to these discussions will always be factual and cooperative, since we have long understood that very few things in public policy can be changed in only one country — either Mexico or the U.S. — without impacting, almost immediately, millions of lives in the other.

Alfonso Navarro-Bernachi is Head Consul of Mexico in Kansas City. He co-authored this with Lee Wong-Medina, Deputy Consul of Mexico in Kansas City.

This story was originally published February 23, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Kansas City gun lawsuit will take money out of the Mexican drug cartels’ hands."