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> Small Arms Survey reported that in 2017, Mexico had 12.9 guns per 100 civilians, although of the 16,809,000 guns estimated in circulation in that year, only 3,118,592 were legally registered.

>This high level of unregistered firearms has been attributed to Mexico’s proximity with the United States, as thousands of gun retailers sit just over the border. A report on gun trafficking between the US and Mexico revealed that almost 90% of the guns recovered and identified from Mexican crime scenes can be traced back to firearm dealers in the neighbouring country.

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Mexico actually has one of the lower homicide rates in Latin America (17th in LA, 20th worldwide). Proximity to the US isn't correlated with a high homicide rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

What you're pointing out is exactly what the article misses: firearms are not the only tool used in homicides.

Negative effects on society from homicide are because of the violent death, not because of the mechanism.

That's a bingo!

You can't really draw very much from the poorly framed data in this article. They selected these 6 countries by absolute number of deaths / guns, rather than per capita; mix suicides with homicides; and don't include the overall number of homicides, which (as I think you're suggesting) could be used to tease out direction of causality.

Moreover, n=6 lies in the realm of anecdote, not data. There are ~200 countries in the UN. If you want to know anything significant, throw all their gun ownership rates, homicide rotes, Gini coefficients, etc into a regression and maybe you'll be able to say something interesting.

You just say bingo.

A subtlety in that quote: most guns were not submitted for tracing in the first place. Of those that were, ~90% led to the US.

The whole 90-percent-of-Mexican-gun-crimes-happened-with-US-sourced-guns argument never passed the smell test with me. Guns are expensive at retail. And wholesale prices aren’t low, either. Who wants to spend truckloads of cash on brand new guns from licensed dealers when all manner of ex-military AKs and FNs are available on the Latin American black market? Much cheaper and less risky to get guns from the south than the north.

Anyway, what’s the proportion made up by US-sourced firearms? Nobody’s sure, but probably nowhere near the bulk of it:

https://www.factcheck.org/2009/04/counting-mexicos-guns/

> most guns were not submitted for tracing in the first place

Kind of like claiming that fewer than 10% of accusations for a given crime are false, based on the fact that, out of the cases that prosecutors decide to bring to trial, over 90% result in convictions.

If that is true, then Canada should have exactly the same problem.

I would assume Canada has much stronger border control than Mexico.

The border between Vancouver and Washington is literally a ditch.

Why would you assume that of the longest undefended border on Earth?

I've heard various stories of people being caught shortly after crossing the border (by accident or otherwise), via cameras and so on. Granted, these might be isolated anecdotes.

I highly doubt it. Our border is really too big to guard effectively, and frankly no one really cares to.

There is a border crossing that literally just consists of some cameras and phones: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/northwest-angle (admittedly to smuggle things through this you would have to take a boat to get there, and if you did this regularly someone would probably notice)

There are towns (and houses, and at least one library, also a restaurant) split down the middle with no barrier: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-incredible-complic...

And there are ridiculously many miles of basically uninhabited border.

It's probably "stronger" at the well traveled crossings, but only because you're not likely to be able to bribe our border guards.

The united states and canada invest heavily in a physical barrier. Both countries regularly clear the forests on the border so that the entire border is more easily patrollable. Because of this physical barrier and cooperation between the countries it is extremely difficult to cross the canadian united states border without being immediately noticed and caught.

Wtf are you talking about? There are numerous stories of people accidentally crossing the border without even knowing it while hiking or boating. And you're really going to tell me that clearing the forests for 20ft at the border magically prevents people from crossing if they want to? Do you think there are thousands of drones patrolling the clearings or something?

There are numerous stories I've heard of people crossing the border and then being met by authorities and sent back: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/06/23...

For example, this guy crossed accidentally, and was promptly met by ICE agents.

> And you're really going to tell me that clearing the forests for 20ft at the border magically prevents people from crossing if they want to?

Yes... it's littered with ground sensors and cameras.

> Do you think there are thousands of drones patrolling the clearings or something?

No. Of course not. But there is a sophisticated system on both sides to deal promptly with these things.

The story you cited was a jogger (female, by the way) who crossed via road in broad daylight in front of border patrol agents. There are no ground sensors or video cameras in the thousands of miles of border between roads and marked paths - the clearing is just there to tell you that you're at the border. If you're so inclined, you can hike away from border stations and cross between the US and Canada at your leisure.

I believe Canada and Mexico both have more guns per capita than the USA does, but one has less gun violence than the USA and the other has more...feel free to look it up and double check me on that though my brain is rusty and I think I last looked into it around Y2K.

Canada definitely does not have more guns per capita. USA is the highest in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

Canada has substantially fewer guns than the US, and handguns are basically banned. As a Canadian I've never seen one in my entire life other than on a cop or military.

Because you haven't seen one does not mean it's banned. There is easily millions of legal handguns in private hands in Canada, probably another few millions illegal ones (including both the ones in criminals hands, and those in otherwise "law-abiding" families who never bothered to register them).

Hand guns are not banned in Canada. One cannot carry, but there are plenty of legal handguns at homes. Owner can take hand gun to range and back, but not drive around with it.

We do have a problem in that for the non-suicide firearms violence that does occur in Canada a great amount of the weapons involved were smuggled in from the USA and are restricted or prohibited in Canada.

Canada has a much stronger, better funded government and, in particular, they don’t have the drug trade pushing amounts of money rivaling state budgets into crime syndicates.

Mexico has been destabilized by U.S. influences fore decades and the widespread corruption is in no small due to the number of areas where honest cops and prosecutors are dead – there’s even a phrase “plomo o plumo” (Silver or lead?) describing the decision so many have been told to make. That’s a huge inflection point which is hard for any country to recover from.

It's "plomo o plata" (lead or silver).

Oh, you’re totally right - that’s what I get for responding too quickly. Thanks for the correction.

>>A report on gun trafficking between the US and Mexico revealed that almost 90% of the guns recovered and identified from Mexican crime scenes can be traced back to firearm dealers in the neighbouring country.

Do you really think that cartels would be gunless if USA outlaws guns tomorrow? They need guns to win and protect their tens of billion dollar business. They can't sue in court if you don't pay for the 1450 kilos so they use guns. They'd get them, and the dollar difference would not even raise the coke price.

Drugs are smuggled all over the world yet Mexico seems particularly prone to gun violence.

I agree with you in one sense though: there is no hope of eliminating illegal firearms in a continent already awash with them.

The cartels will easily get their guns from wherever they need, surely.

Highly organized, powerful crime outfits will always have access.

That said - with Supply and Demand - it may be that their front line guys are weakened.

Instead of the mock-AK or high powered rifle, they just have a pistol or a revolver. It makes a difference.

Mexico has a firearm homicide rate of ~6.3 murders / 100k people / yr. The United States has a lower rate, 4.62 murders / 100k people /yr [0].

If American guns are the problem, why aren't the gun homicide rates higher in the United States than Mexico?

But at the very least, it sounds like Mexico could benefit from stronger border security, too many guns are flowing across its porous border with the US. How many Mexican lives would a wall save from gun violence?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...

Mexico would also benefit if we solved our drug problem. We’ve created a huge economic opportunity for the black market in Mexico. If we really focused on drug rehab instead of just throwing people in jail I bet a lot of the violence in Mexico would go away.

Why can't Mexico perform the basic state function of protecting its citizens from organized violence?

Drug rehab may sound like a panacea, but as it's practiced and administered in America, rehab centers seem to respond to their perverse incentive to treat addicts enough to get them out the door and relapsed back into treatment.

I think we're doing a lot to treat addiction, but Mexico can't count on us to solve the hard problem of addiction. Mexico would be much better served by doing the comparatively easy task of reducing corruption and violence rates to something that reflects its status as a middle-income country with European institutions. Simply making it harder for cartels to thrive and for Mexican politicians/police to profit off of drugs would reduce the amount of drug pushing here in America.

> Why can't Mexico perform the basic state function of protecting its citizens from organized violence?

The drug cartel has better funding. This is why you see El Chapo housed in the US and not Mexico anymore.

Do the drug cartels have better funding? Mexico's Federal Budget was $314 billion dollars last year, estimates put America's illegal drug expenditures in the region of $100 billion [0], I imagine a lot of that money stays within the country. But I don't see how it's possible for Mexican cartels have even 25% of the budget of the government.

Why do you think the Mexican drug cartels have better funding than a government with a budget of $300 billion/yr?

IIRC, El Chapo is in America because Mexican prisons couldn't contain him. All his prison breaks involved corrupt guards, in fact, during his trial it was claimed that El Chapo paid a $100 million dollar bribe to the sitting President of Mexico. I think it's more plausible that Mexicans would rather join in the festival of corruption, saying that the Government is outclassed by the resources of the cartels seems false.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade_in_the_Unit...

Most of the Mexico's federal budget isn't for protecting citizens from violent criminals, if I remember correctly the federal budget for "security" (police, army, navy, etc.) is less than $20 billion dollars.

Why can't Mexico perform the basic state function of protecting its citizens from organized violence?

Because the cartels have made so much money from drugs that they threaten Mexican sovereignty in a lot of regions. The cartels literally operate their own private armies capable of waging war against any government forces that try to police their regions.

This is all due to the fact that the US economy is so big, its appetite for drugs so insatiable, and its arms industry so powerful that the Mexican government can't keep up.

The truth behind you question is that a significant amount of cartel power came from CIA policies in the 80s and 90s.

Illegally funding the contra through cocaine sales is a proven thing in the 80s with confessions of continuing alliances in the the 90s.

The second truth is that it doesn't help that the Spanish governed like they did or further that James K. Polk conspired with Santa Anna and started a war to "acquire" the West, or that the U.S. never paid its half of the deal.

> Why can't Mexico perform the basic state function of protecting its citizens from organized violence?

The basic state function is to protect citizens from unorganized violence.

Fending off organized violence (other than from the state itself) is a goal, but it is frequently not achieved and often not attempted because it's so unrealistic. If Germany really wanted Luxembourg, it would take it, and Luxembourg wouldn't be able to stop it.

I think part of the problem comes from the fact that stopping corruption takes effort, and when people have large differences in power relative to each other then basic state functions deteriorate. The United States seems to have power imbalances which lead to corruption.

For example, see the Jerry Epstein case in Florida: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html

Other examples might include the water problem in Flint, the deterioration of Detroit, or even the violence problem in South Chicago.

Rehabs expanded under the ACA due to the insurance coverage mandate. Quality however has always been suspect. Most rehabs are not evidence based and there are a whole bunch of very shady rehabs in Florida and other places.

RE Mexican govt. protection: If you're the cartel and the police are giving you trouble in a certain area, you have some options: Bribe whoever needs bribing to make it stop. Brazenly shoot up the police station until they all quit. Murder everybody on the force and their families. Or offer to hire them all at 2-3 times the salary and murder the ones who refuse. This is what people are talking about when they say wealth inequality is a destabilizing influence.

RE drug rehab: "Solving" drug addiction would be a sufficient, but unnecessary, way of stopping violence in Latin America. You don't have to tackle that whole big problem; all you have to do is legalize across the board. That makes drug production the province of legitimate businessmen right here in the US, not a vocation that only the poorest/most desperate/most violent/least risk-averse will take on.

> rehab centers seem to respond to their perverse incentive to treat addicts enough to get them out the door and relapsed back into treatment

Interesting. Unrelatedly: how's OkCupid going for everyone?

okcupid never pretended to be good at its job, merely ok.

I've heard (but I don't have a link right now) that legalization of marijuana has already drastically reduced the amount of marijuana being brought into the country, so I expect further legalization to increase this effect. Marijuana is one of, if not the most lucrative drugs for traffickers.

I don't think rehab will have nearly as big of an effect as legalization/regulation. We should be looking for safer alternatives to more dangerous, often abused drugs. For examine, "magic mushrooms" are generally safer than other psychedelics, and LSD can be relatively safely used under supervision (and has potential for medical uses as well), so we should be considering those for legalization as well once marijuana is legalized.

It's far easier to control a problem if you control distribution than if you don't. Attacking it from a rehab angle doesn't solve the biggest problem with drugs: trafficking. Legalization solves that aspect, and taxes on drugs could fund rehab, so it's a win win situation.

Therefore, I want drug legalization as the primary focus for curbing drug-related violence specifically, and violent crime generally, since I believe it will have the largest positive effect for zero cost (in fact, it should be a net win).

Has literally anybody said that American guns are "the whole problem"? This seems like a strawman that's simplistic to the point of parody. It's not that people think that guns magically cause murders, it's that people think American guns cause Mexican murders. That doesn't mean American guns cause American murders at the same rate, because (ready for a shock here) America is not Mexico.

FYI, I downvoted the parent because of the tone of the first sentence.

Both countries could benefit from an EU-style NAFTA that allows for truly free movement of people and goods (no passports, no tariffs, no customs inspections, etc) between borders. Today that proposal would probably be problematic, but the U.S. Mexico and Canada should be pursuing "ever closer union" to borrow the EU's phrase.

Mexico is a crime ridden third world country. What do you think it's citizens are going to do if you open up the border?

How many millions of people do you think the US can suddenly take on? And you don't think they'll bring crime with them?

1) Come work. 2) 1 seems pretty doable. 3 is probably pushing it. Still less than 1% increase, but would be a stretch. 3) yes? We aren’t exactly crime free today. More labor, bigger economy, police and courts and jails would scale up >1%, just as if a bunch of people moved here.

We currently run at just shy of 1% in prison. If we admit a million, 10k criminals wouldn’t even be noticed.

10k criminals won’t commit 10k crimes. It will likely be hundreds of thousands of crimes. Not insignificant. Most criminals aren’t one-time offenders.

> If American guns are the problem, why aren't the gun homicide rates higher in the United States than Mexico?

One of the answers is money. USA has more of it - for policing, for prisons, for making sure corruption and taking bribes from crime is less of an attractive choice. More poverty and profits of drug trafficking push the homicide numbers up in Mexico.

Of course American guns are not the whole problem but they are the problem alright. Here in Canada from 50 to 75% of illegal guns come from south of border.

>One of the answers is money.

It would be convenient if it were true, but I don't think money is a great explanation. I come from a rural area in the Midwest, the people are very poor (even poorer than the urban poor) but have a lot of guns. Despite being poor and armed, the gun homicide rates are very low (the suicide rates are unfortunately not that low).

Can you help me understand why poor farmers in the midwest don't commit as many murders as similarly poor and armed Mexicans?

I understand you are helping to differentiate between political and social stability and the easy metric "money", however, poor means something very different in Mexico and central America than it does in the Midwest. I agree with you- there's more going on than just money. But your example isn't convincing to me, because there is a huge difference in the financial capability and stability of the very poor in america, and the very poor of our southern neighbors. Also, just because someone in america is very poor doesn't mean they don't benefit from the wealth of our country in other ways- stronger prisons, often better schools and police, though that does vary a bit by community.

The answer to your question was in the comment:

> for policing, for prisons, for making sure corruption and taking bribes from crime is less of an attractive choice

Does this rural Midwest area have an active police presence? How well policed do you think a rural area in Mexico is?

Most rural Midwest areas have very little law enforcement presence. There may be only a few sheriff's deputies on duty at a time to cover a large county. It can take a long time for help to arrive, so residents learn to take more responsibility for themselves.

>Does this rural Midwest area have an active police presence?

Not anything like you'd see in a more developed area. We had a county sheriff - I recall going months without seeing a law enforcement officer, I think we had a police to citizen ratio about 1/4th that of the nearest major city. Over the holidays, even getting emergency services can be really dicey. One time my neighbors were screaming and yelling at each other, we called the police and the dispatch told us that unless we heard it get physical, they wouldn't be able to send an officer out until the next day or the day after.

>How well policed do you think a rural area in Mexico is?

Probably equally as well, but the police in rural mexico are much more likely to be an extension of the cartels than police in the rural Midwest. If those cases, increasing patrols would actually increase cartel power. Until Mexico figures out their corruption issues, it's not clear how things can get better.

The rural areas of much of the US effectively have no police presence. In these regions, the primary law enforcement is the county sheriff (and a few deputies) and they may have responsibility for an area the size of a small European country. You generally don't see them unless you call them. Honestly, murder rates in many of these parts of the US are negligible and people tend to sort out their own issues -- the sheriff often acts as an arbitrator when neighbors can't. Sheriffs are typically elected, local, and have an enormous amount of autonomy within their jurisdiction.

I've seen more "police" in rural Mexico than I have in many parts of the rural US.

Where do the rest of the illegal guns in Canada come from?

From Canada. Despite tighter regulation, guns are still not completely prohibited and many illegal guns start their life as a legal purchase.

You're clearly looking to veer this into a traditional debate along traditional lines. I don't think you'll find anyone in sociology who believes that any civic problems are monocausal. People who make these kinds of arguments are usually trying to ensure that, on a list of correlation coefficients, your favored cause is not considered highly correlative or "the sole problem," in your words. Inevitably, your next argument will be whataboutism for various other correlations you'd prefer we all look at.

Actually, you'll find that the correlation coefficient between gun availability and homicides/suicides involving a firearm are quite high across countries (0.7 - 0.9) [1,2].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1485564/pdf/cma...

[2] https://journals.lww.com/jtrauma/Abstract/2000/12000/Firearm...

The article that sparked this discussion was about murders. In that context suicide is a red herring.

No, then you didn't even click the article links. From the first study, for example, the correlation with homicide rates is 0.746.

This conveniently ignores that in many ways, the U.S. is actively supplying guns to South America. And child comments ignore CIA effects on the drug trade.

Choose your program, "Fast and the Furious", "Iran Contra", activity in Chile and Panama, the early 90s.

> If American guns are the problem, why aren't the gun homicide rates higher in the United States than Mexico?

Guns don't kill people, a corrupt political and judicial system held at bay by a massive influx of cash and illegal smuggling from gigantic narco trafficing empires at war with each other over the right to make the most money off the US Drug War kills people.

Once the US has the same problems, then gun homicides will be higher here. (however, we are #1 in gun homicides among developed western nations, so we're on our way!)

Mexico has a violent crime problem driven by drug trafficking. That’s why.

> The United States has a lower [homicide] rate

No it has not, the wikipedia article mentions "death rate". "homicide" != "death". About 2/3 of America's death rate is suicide. Canadians statistics show that gun control has no effect on suicide.

"why aren't the gun homicide rates higher in the United States than Mexico?"

Mexico has vast lawless areas where there is nary any law enforcement, and cartels fight with other cartels for power.

For reference:

+ Canada has many fewer guns than the US, and many fewer gun crimes + European countries have vastly fewer guns, vastly less gun crime + Japan has almost no guns, and almost no gun crime.

When looking at civilized states where laws are actually enforced then there's a correlation between guns and gun crime.

While most legal gun owners are not more likely to be criminal, the preponderance of available guns just gives the statistical chance that someone in a bad mood can get one much higher.

In other words: loose gun laws mean low level bad guys can get a hold of guns in a much more easy way.

Every car you pass on the highway in the US, there's a half decent chance there's a gun in there. In Canada, there's very little chance.

The 'odd man out' is Switzerland: they have a lot of guns. Their guns are however for civil defence: rifles, not hand guns, and they definitely do not have 'self defence culture' whereby people actually carry weapons. They are locked up in the basement or at the armoury. Also, they are amazingly civilized with low social strife etc..

It would be nice to see America have much stricter gun laws while not so much infringing on the essential right to own a gun. I think it's possible.

"Operations" like the ones listed here [1] were one of the reasons thousands of illegal guns flooded Mexico while the cartels were at their worst. It was as if destabilization was a goal, just as George Bush Junior insistently called Mexico a failed state, while pressuring our government to buy American weapons or be outgunned. Everyone knows the huge mess that did, I'm surprised we didn't end with guerrillas like Colombia, but it was likely because the next president wasn't Republican.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal

This article suggests the main externality from the USA contributing to violence and instability in Mexico (not to mention Colombia before the current peace process) is guns. That's laughable.

The first rule of clickbait is that it has to make me feel something, anything, whether it's anger, fear, warm fuzzy, or here, moral superiority. I can easily read this and think, oh, it's those hick gun nuts who are causing Mexican children to die and mayors to be shot. Doesn't have anything to do with all those drugs that I and all my friends have tried at least once, or with our puritanical legislators who think that protecting their constituents from temptation is more important than the lives of Mexican civilians. Carry on, as you were.

That's a pretty good tactic.

Our government is entirely responsible for the rise of organized crime and corrupt officials in Mexico with respect to the War on Drugs, just as we were responsible for:

* the rise of organized crime and crack cocaine in California in the 80's when we were also caught proliferating drugs and firearms into Los Angeles to fund radical terrorist groups

* the rise of organized crime and corrupt officials in New York and Chicago after the Prohibition movement

* the rise of organized crime and terrorist cells in the Middle East after repeated meddling in foreign affairs in the pursuance of economic dominance and control of resources

* the rise of organized crime and corrupt officials in parts of South America where both the War on Drugs and staging of coups and election meddling have wreaked havoc on the population

But instead, we can use this as a way to convince people that American citizens have too much easy access to firearms. Because it's really in our best economic interest that only police, criminals and criminal organizations have guns. I would be surprised if the CIA wasn't in some level behind this report, with their sterling track record.

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