US ‘losing battle’ to stem flow of illegal guns into Mexico – attorney general
Chris McGreal
London Guardian
November 9, 2011
The Obama administration has warned that the US is “losing the battle” to stem the flow of weapons from American guns shops to Mexican drug cartels responsible for tens of thousands of killings.
The US attorney general, Eric Holder, told a Senate hearing that Congress is in part to blame because of its hostility to gun control, even going so far as to try and block federal law enforcement agencies from requiring gun shops to report multiple sales of automatic weapons.
Holder described as “flawed” American attempts to break the cycle, in which the profits from selling illegal drugs in the US are used to buy guns that are shipped across the Mexican border to the cartels which use them to protect their operations – and conduct a small scale war in which 40,000 Mexicans have been killed over the past five years – in order to send more drugs to the US. He noted that of 94,000 weapons captured from drug traffickers by the Mexican authorities, more than 64,000 originated in the US.
“We are losing the battle to stop the flow of illegal guns to Mexico,” said Holder.
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