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Mexico has filed a lawsuit in a US court against Smith & Wesson Brands, Glock, Sturm, Ruger and Co., and other major gun manufacturers, accusing them of contributing to gang violence south of the US border.
The civil suit in a Massachusetts federal district court filed on Wednesday argues that the companies “wreak havoc in Mexican society, by persistently supplying a torrent of guns to the drug cartels.”
In 2019, 17,000 Mexican citizens were murdered with guns manufactured in the US, compared to 14,000 citizens of the US itself. This is despite Mexico having a smaller population and only one gun store, according to the suit.
“For decades, the government and its citizens have been victimised by a deadly flood of military-style and other particularly lethal guns that flows from the US across the border, into criminal hands in Mexico,” the country said in its lawsuit. “This flood is not a natural phenomenon or an inevitable consequence of the gun business or of US gun laws. It is the foreseeable result of the defendants’ deliberate actions and business practices.”
The complaint names US-based manufacturers “whose guns are most often recovered in Mexico”: Smith & Wesson, Glock and Sturm, Ruger and Co., Beretta USA, Colt’s Manufacturing Company, and Century International Arms. It also names Barrett, saying its .50-calibre sniper rifle “is a weapon of war prized by the drug cartels,” and Interstate Arms, a wholesaler.
The Mexican government estimates that 70 percent of the weapons trafficked to Mexico come from the US, according to the Foreign Affairs Ministry.
The country said it was suing “to put an end to the massive damage” that the gun makers cause by enabling the flow of weapons across the US’s southern border, saying that almost all of the firearms recovered at crime scenes in Mexico come from the north.
The defendants do business “in ways they know routinely arm the drug cartels in Mexico,” use corrupt dealers and “dangerous and illegal sales practices,” design the weapons to fire automatically, and ignore recommendations to prevent such trafficking, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit seeks damages for Mexico for an amount to be determined by the court.
