The Favorite U.S. Weapons of Mexico’s Drug Cartels
Published: March 20, 2023
Mexico law enforcement recovers thousands of rifles from violent crime scenes every year. A staggering number of these rifles are high-powered .50-caliber firearms and assault weapons trafficked from the United States. Preferred by Mexico’s drug cartels, these weapons continue to threaten national security and public safety on both sides of the border.
The type of weapon matters: The flood of .50-caliber rifles and assault weapons from the U.S. has enabled drug cartels to outgun Mexico’s security forces and expand their influence and activities. That is because these weapons have characteristics and capabilities that make them particularly lethal:
The bullets fired by .50-caliber rifles are powerful enough to punch through concrete walls, bulletproof vests, and armored vehicles such as tanks. In 2016, cartel members used a .50-caliber rifle to down a Mexican state police helicopter, killing the pilot and four others.
The term “assault weapon” generally refers to a group of firearms manufactured as semi-automatic, meaning they shoot one round with each pull of the trigger. One well-known assault weapon is the AR-15. The Mexican government says assault weapons can easily be converted into fully automatic machine guns — which continue firing rounds as long as the trigger is held. Such conversions are commonly carried out by cartels, enabling them to fire more bullets in the direction of government forces, rival cartels, and innocent victims — and potentially kill or injure more of them.
Assault weapons are also highly customizable, and even those that remain semi-automatic can be modified to help improve a shooter’s accuracy when firing rapidly.
Defining assault weapons: There is no universally agreed upon definition of exactly what constitutes an assault weapon. However, the term is generally used to denote firearms that share certain characteristics, including features associated with or designed more for the military than civilians. The lack of a standardized definition has made it difficult for U.S. state and federal policymakers to effectively regulate assault weapons.
The U.S. once outlawed assault weapons: In 1994, then-President Bill Clinton signed the so-called Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which prohibited the manufacture, transfer, or possession of certain assault weapons. However, before sending the bill to Clinton’s desk, Congress inserted a sunset provision so the ban would automatically expire after a decade unless lawmakers voted to renew it. That decade came and went, and Congress chose not to act. As a result, the possession and sale of assault weapons became legal once again in 2004.
The impacts on Mexico: Mexican officials believe that the former U.S. assault weapons ban kept a lid on the trafficking of these firearms into Mexico. In 2021, the Mexican government filed a lawsuit accusing Smith & Wesson and other U.S. firearm manufacturers of exploiting the ban’s expiration to vastly increase production of the assault weapons favored by drug cartels, causing violence in Mexico to soar. A U.S. district court judge dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that the gun manufacturers were protected from civil liability under a U.S. law known as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA. On March 15, 2023, Mexico announced its appeal of the judge’s decision, insisting that PLCAA “has no effect on damages caused in Mexican territory.”
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The power of reporting requirements: The U.S. has cracked down on the cross-border trafficking of assault weapons by requiring certain gun shops to notify authorities about bulk sales. U.S. gun shops have long been required to alert the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) when customers buy two or more handguns within five consecutive business days. A 2010 inspector general review of ATF efforts to combat gun trafficking to Mexico found that while reporting multiple handgun sales had produced “timely, actionable investigative leads,” the cartels preferred assault weapons, which were not then subject to the reporting requirement. So in 2011, the ATF started requiring multiple assault weapon sales to be reported by gun shops in the four southwest border states: California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. ATF officials later reported that this change had helped them identify gun traffickers in a timelier manner and on several occasions had led to arrests and seizures of firearms intended for trafficking to Mexico.
One step forward: The wave of mass shootings involving assault weapons in the U.S. has prompted fresh calls for the Federal Assault Weapons Ban to be reinstated. While U.S. political realities have made the passage of another ban in near-term unlikely, there has been movement on this issue at the state-level. In January 2023, Illinois became at least the ninth state with some form of assault weapons ban.
Two possible steps back: Illinois’ ban could be struck down due to a legal challenge that had yet to be decided as of March 2023. California, the only border state with an assault weapons ban on the books, is likewise at risk of seeing its law overturned. The outcome of these cases could have implications for gun trafficking into Mexico given the cartels’ ongoing drug ties to Illinois and California and their use of these states as sources of firearms.
