MILESFORTIS

“To ban guns because the criminals use them is to tell the law abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and lawless.” – Lysander Spooner

What Do Mexican Drug Cartels Have to Do With Your Second Amendment Rights?

If Mexican drug cartels started using Toyota pickup trucks to transport fentanyl across the border, would that somehow undermine your constitutional right to travel? Of course not. But according to gun control attorney Jonathan Lowy, the fact that Mexican cartels use some AR-15s purchased in the United States and smuggled across the border should count against the Second Amendment rights of millions of Americans who own the same type of rifle.

Lowy has apparently discovered a new way to interpret the Constitution: the more criminals like something, the fewer rights the rest of us should have.

The longtime gun control activist, who helped represent the Mexican government in its doomed lawsuit against the U.S. firearms industry trying to hold it responsible for cartel violence south of the border, recently presented his novel argument to the Supreme Court in an amicus brief for his group Global Action on Gun Violence in defense of “assault weapon bans.” Now Lowy has elaborated in a column at Substack, where he contends that “Mexican crime guns shouldn’t create a constitutional right.”

GAGV’s brief highlights a largely overlooked issue relevant to the case: a significant portion of the demand for U.S.-sold assault weapons comes from Mexican drug cartels and other foreign criminal organizations.

That matters because Petitioners’ constitutional argument rests heavily on production and sales figures. They contend that weapons “in common use” are protected by the Second Amendment, that millions of assault weapons have been sold in the United States, and therefore there is a Constitutional right to AR-15s.

There’s a few problems with this argument, as GAGV’s brief points out. First, sales are not the same as possession by law-abiding Americans for lawful purposes. Hundreds of thousands of assault rifles are purchased in the United States by straw purchasers for foreign criminal organizations, including Mexican cartels.

A rifle bought in Texas or Arizona and trafficked to Mexico or elsewhere (or interdicted by law enforcement before making it across the border) remains part of the U.S. manufacturing and sales total cited by Petitioners to argue that assault weapons are in “common use.”

Yet that rifle may be used in Mexico to protect a drug shipment, enforce cartel control, commit a kidnapping, attack a rival organization, or confront police or military forces.

These weapons are highly prized by cartels, often selling “for double the purchase price or more in Mexico.” Estimates suggest that “between 250,000 to 1 million firearms [are] trafficked from the U.S. to Mexico each year.”

And how many of those are legal purchases by the Mexican government that are diverted to cartel members? As Shayl Attkisson reported last October, “the Mexican government was the top buyer of U.S. guns later traced to crime scenes in Mexico” from 2016 to 2023.

Keep in mind that not all of those firearms are AR-15s. Lowy’s figure includes all kinds of firearms, not just the semi-automatic centerfire rifles in question in the Viramontes case. I can understand why the gun control activist would want to make it seem like a large portion of legal sales of these firearms end up in the hands of the Mexican drug cartels, but there’s simply no evidence that’s the case.

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