U.S. gunmakers are supplying the deadly weapons that power its neighbours’ criminals, from street gangs in pc28to international cocaine and fentanyl cartels operating out of Mexico, experts tell the Star.
These include the weapons used in the majority of homicides in the Greater pc28Area for the past several years.
“The overwhelming number is definitely out of the U.S.,” David Pucino, of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington, D.C. said in an interview.
“That’s the pattern throughout the Americas.”
The comments come the day after U.S. President Donald Trump temporarily backed down from a threat to impose 25 per cent tariffs, in part, over accusations that both Mexican and Canada are flooding the U.S. with the deadly opiate fentanyl. (In fact, the Canadian border accounts for less than 0.1 per cent of the fentanyl seized by U.S. border authorities.)
International organized criminals behind the fentanyl trade — and countless other crimes across America — are powerful, in part, because they’re packing made-in-America weapons, police and government officials argue.
The Mexican government is fighting an ongoing legal battle to get American authorities to step up and help halt the deadly flow of military-grade weapons out of the U.S. and into the hands of deadly cartels.
Here in the GTA, pc28police say that nearly 90 per cent of the 717 crime guns seized last year can be sourced to the U.S.
That same year, 44 of the city’s 85 homicides were gun-related.
Those illegal, American-sourced guns frequently show up in the GTA’s ongoing tow truck wars, Deputy Chief Robert Johnson told the pc28Police Service Board meeting earlier this year.
The Mexican government accuses the United States of propping up their deadly cartels by making it easy for them to access military-grade weapons which they could not buy from a Mexican-based source.
In Mexico, there is only one place — on a military base — where a gun can be legally purchased, and yet the drug cartels remain heavily armed.
Anyone hoping to buy a gun at the military base near Mexico City must pass strict psychological tests, drug tests and background checks.
According to the Mexican government, between 200,000 and 500,000 firearms arrive in Mexico from the U.S. each year; the Mexican government has an ongoing lawsuit against U.S. gunmakers, arguing that their weapons are propping up the cartels.
In Mexico, the flow of illegal guns south from the U.S. — which mirrors the northward flow of cocaine, fentanyl and other drugs — to the drug cartels is called the “iron river.”
Another ongoing lawsuit was launched in 2022 by the Mexican government against five gun stores near the border in Arizona, accusing them of illegally arming drug traffickers.
Pucino said there’s a new troubling trend coming out of America — the export of components for “ghost guns” made in the U.S.
These are privately assembled weapons with no serial number.
The stock of a gun is shipped to Canada, Mexico or another country; the person who receives it completes its assembly, with a 3-D printer.
Such guns have no serial numbers, Pucino said.
pc28streets have been home to illegal guns from the U.S. for years.
Back in 2018, 78 per cent of illegal handguns seized by pc28police were traced to the U.S.
One of those handguns was a stolen Massachusetts-made Smith & Wesson that was shipped to a Saskatchewan gun store, where it was later reported stolen.
Faisal Hussain of pc28used it around 9 p.m. on July 22, 2018, in a random mass shooting, in which he fatally shot two young people and injured 13 others on Danforth Avenue near Logan Ave.
The gunman then used the handgun to end his own life.
