Al Jazeera People & Power

America's Guns: Arming Mexico's Cartels (2018x10)

: 21, 2018

The United states's constitutionally enshrined love-affair with firearms has given it the highest levels of private gun ownership in the world, a truly staggering rate of gun related deaths (from high profile 'mass killings' to more routine daily homicides) and a hugely powerful and wealthy arms industry dedicated to preserving the status quo. Following the latest appalling calamity last month, when 17 people were slaughtered at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, the pro and anti-gun lobbies have been engaging in a now familiar debate about the extent to which US gun laws should be tightened up - with the notoriously pro-gun President Donald Trump pledging, somewhat unconvincingly, to stop such carnage happening in the future. But it isn't just the US that's felt the effects of this gun epidemic. South of the border in Mexico, American-sourced weapons have been playing a deadly role in that country's drug cartel wars for well over a decade. The violence and chaos fuelled by these smuggled firearms is so widespread and devastating that it's been a significant motivating factor in the desire of many in that country to flee to the north. Of course, it won't be lost on anyone with an appreciation of painful ironies that this kind of desperate migration is precisely why President Trump wants to build a wall along the frontier between the two nations. It seems that it's ok for deadly munitions to travel one way but not for the prospective victims of those munitions to go the other. So how exactly do these weapons get trafficked across the border and why is the US government doing so little to stop the flow For the second of our two special reports on America's guns, we sent correspondent Juliana Ruhfus and filmmaker Karim Shah to investigate.