On a warm Thursday in July, San Diego Democratic Rep. Juan Vargas (D-San Diego) was part of a Congressional delegation visiting Mexico's stunning presidential palace in the heart of Mexico City.
After a tour of the palace grounds, the lawmakers got down to business with current Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and her predecessor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
"We wanted to talk about drugs and fentanyl," Vargas said. "We wanted to talk about sewage in San Diego."
But Mexico’s top leaders had other priorities.
"They said 'great, we’ll work on that,'" Vargas recalled. "'But help us with these weapons. You guys are arming the cartels. You guys are sending all of these weapons.'"
They were talking about the illegal flow of guns from the U.S. to Mexico made possible by the combination of Mexico’s strict gun control laws and the easy access Americans have to firearms. Every year, more than 10,000 firearms found in Mexican crime scenes are traced back to the United States, according to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
That southern flow, which gun control activists call the "iron river," has had a devastating impact south of the border. Seven of the 10 most dangerous cities in the world measured by homicide rate are in Mexico, according to World Atlas.
"You see the shootouts there, it’s like something you’d have in a war," Vargas said. "They have an incredible arsenal of weapons."
A trove of data
Federal laws prohibit ATF from publicly releasing what is known as "trace data," which identifies where guns found in Mexico came from. Instead, ATF is limited to publishing aggregate data of the overall numbers traced to the U.S. but not more specific geographic data.
Advocates have long argued that lack of transparent and reliable data hampers state and federal lawmakers from drafting policies that could disrupt the Iron River.
However, some of these more detailed records are now public thanks to a successful lawsuit against the ATF filed by John Lindsay-Poland, who’s with the San Francisco -based advocacy group Stop U.S. Arms to Mexico.
The data set, which covers the seven-year period from 2015 to 2022, includes more than 55,000 guns found in crime scenes in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador that were traced back to the U.S. It is broken down by zip codes of where the guns were purchased, along with the gun manufacturer, model and caliber.
"Understanding the patterns and overall flow of firearms, how it’s changing over time, where they’re coming from, and what kind of guns is really important to design policies and actions that can stem that illegal flow," Lindsay-Poland said.
He believes the data has the potential to save lives.
"If there’s hundreds of guns traced to a zip code, then I think it’s an opportunity for people in that community to say we don’t want to be the source of this," he said.
ATF officials did not respond to an emailed list of questions regarding the data.
The guns found in Mexican crime scenes came from all corners of the U.S. Not surprisingly, large numbers came from border states, the data show. Nearly 22,000 came from Texas, while roughly 9,400 and 7,400 came from Arizona and California, respectively.
When the data is broken down by ZIP code, the area including McAllen, TX tops the list with roughly 1,000 U.S. guns traced to crimes in Mexico.
In San Diego, the two most active zip codes were 91950 in National City and 92110 in the Morena neighborhood of San Diego, the data show.
Gun rights advocates warned against using the data to make sweeping conclusions about the entire industry. For example, the data does not include any information on individual gun dealers, said Lawrence Keane, the senior vice president and general counsel to the National Sports Shooting Foundation, which is the firearms industry trade association.
Additionally, Keane pointed out that the data does not include a purchase date — so there is no way to tell if a gun involved in a Mexican crime was purchased 10 weeks ago or 10 years ago — and there is no information regarding whether the gun was reported stolen after being legally purchased in the U.S.
"Nobody in the industry wants to see firearms illegally obtained and misused either in the United States or south of the border in Mexico," he said. "But the important point is that the industry is not legally responsible for the acts of criminals."
Keane acknowledged the new data could be a useful tool to start an investigation into illegal straw purchasing but said, "It’s wrong to take that data and make blanket assertions that dealers in a given zip code are somehow corrupt."
'We should do something'
The ATF has an annual budget of approximately $1.5 billion, but only allocates about $1.5 million to its efforts in Mexico.
Tim Sloan previously led ATF’s Mexico operations. He says the relatively paltry budget allocation speaks to a failure of leadership at the agency in Washington, D.C.
"Nobody can seriously believe that we’re going all we can when that’s the budget they provided,” Sloan said.
Sloan had a front row seat for the impact of American guns south of the border. In just four years, his team traced roughly 97,000 guns that had been smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Mexico only has one gun store in the entire country and every buyer must be registered with the government, Sloan said. Besides straw purchases from the U.S., another way criminals get firearms is by stealing them from local police departments and the Mexican military, he added.
Sloan recalled some particularly gruesome crime scenes where investigators had to wipe off blood and brain matter from guns in order to find the serial numbers required to trace them.
He believes that this kind of extreme violence contributes to the current migration crisis.
"You leave Michoacán to come to the United States because you will die if you stay," he said. "Your family will die, your children will die. They will kill you, they will hang you from a bridge. The violence is so out of control and over the top, and they are all being murdered with firearms purchased in the United States. We should do something about that."
The flow of American guns into Mexico is nothing new to Steve Lindley.
"It’s frustrating that, at least in my time, 34 years, not much has really changed and we’ve spent millions if not billions trying to do something about it," said Lindley, a former police officer who now works for the Washington D.C.-based gun advocacy group Brady United.
Lindley is hopeful the data released by Stop US Arms to Mexico will put more public pressure on lawmakers. The data could be used to identify bad gun dealers instead of vilifying an entire industry, he said.
"It’s a small amount of dealers that are responsible for the majority of the problem," Lindley said. "We’re not talking about every dealer. Most dealers do their job very well. They are cognizant of what they’re selling, and they want to sell it to the right people."
After publishing the data, Stop US Arms to Mexico sent it many lawmakers, including Vargas.
"This is very important data and I’m glad it’s been made available now to the public," he said.
Vargas believes that this data could be used to shift public opinion on gun regulations. He currently supports a ban on assault weapons and the Stop Arming Cartels Act, which would restrict the purchase of .50-caliber weapons.
But he recognizes that fighting American gun culture and the powerful gun lobby is an uphill battle.
"It’s a tragedy that we can’t break this gun culture that we have," he said.
However a federal assault weapons or even .50-caliber ban are nonstarters for the gun advocates like Keane, who view them as infringements on the Second Amendment.
"Why should we restrict the constitutional rights of law-abiding Americans because Mexico has a crime problem?" Keane said.
Instead of targeting gun dealers, Keane said the focus should be on Mexico’s inability to prosecute criminals or reports of guns being stolen from the Mexican military.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation supports legislation that imposes more criminal penalties of straw purchasers and backs law enforcement solutions that target gun smuggling networks, he added.
