How does gun smuggling work

According to data from ATF, from to , 29 percent of total crime guns recovered and traced were first purchased from a licensed gun dealer in a state other than the one in which the crime was committed.

The flow of guns tends to move from states with weaker gun laws to those with stronger gun laws. The biggest recipients of U. From to , there were more than 11, firearms recovered in Canada that originated in the United States. A study found that, between and , close to , firearms were purchased annually in the United States and subsequently trafficked to Mexico. From to , more than 15, guns that originated in the United States were recovered in connection with crimes in Central America, particularly in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.

While ATF does not publicize trace data regarding crime guns recovered in South America, making it difficult to ascertain the scope of the problem in that part of the world, the federal police of Brazil reported that the United States is the biggest source of foreign firearms in the country and that most of these weapons are handguns and assault rifles. The impact has been devastating. Latin America is the region with the highest level of gun homicides in the world: According to a study, close to 75 percent of homicides are perpetrated with a firearm compared with 44 percent worldwide.

There is no specific crime of gun trafficking under U. For example, it is illegal to straw purchase a firearm on behalf of another person, a crime that is generally charged as making a false statement in connection with a gun sale facilitated by a licensed gun dealer. Gun trafficking also violates some state laws. For example, California, Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island have laws that penalize individuals who purchase firearms with the intent of supplying them to traffickers.

Additionally, the Biden administration recently announced a new enforcement initiative targeting gun trafficking in five high-risk areas across the country. This initiative includes coordination between the U. Department of Justice, local law enforcement agencies, and ATF to mitigate gun trafficking. Our iARMS database contains more than a million records on illicit firearms. Images and references of thousands of firearms to help police correctly identify them.

A unique global source of data on ballistics related to crime scenes. Operations targeting firearms trafficking hotspots have uncovered links between organized crime and terrorism. The symposium addresses the challenges facing law enforcement in firearm-related crime. The Firearms Programme works closely with several regional and international organizations in order to tackle more effectively the causes of the proliferation of small arms and light weapons.

Firearms trafficking. We help police to identify firearms, track their movement and disrupt the supply. France, later on, becomes a primary source of munitions. And then very late in the process, after Israel has survived most of its existential conflicts, the United States steps in. But now that the United States has stepped out, who would Israel turn to given that the United States and Israel are cooperating on weapons manufacturing and that the other competitors in the Middle East, and in Russia and China, have little to offer on that front?

The functionalist approach would also emphasize how the United States is tying Israel to the U. Israel is sometimes the number one or number two recipient of foreign military aid from the United States, which it uses to buy American weapons in the United States. Israel cannot use that aid for any other purpose. The factionalists look at the domestic drivers of munition purchases.

They would be interested in seeing how leaders in Israel—or in any other country—decide between foreign purchase, which creates dependency, and domestic production, which encourages development and local investment. For Israel, this was an investment in Elbit, in Rafael, and in the Israeli military industry that rose and fell depending on the extent to which France, the United States, and Britain were willing to help or not.

When you get help from your allies, it suppresses your domestic production. When your allies fall by the wayside, like the French did in by abandoning the Israeli alliance, you become more independent. The geostrategic lens would focus on armament levels in the Middle East by looking at Cold War effects. The Arab-Israeli conflict would not have lasted as long as it did and would not have led to such a high number of fatalities had it not been a game played by the United States and the Soviet Union to sell weapons, to use weapons, and to try out tactics and strategies that were attached to those weapons.

There are two modest exceptions to this relative disinterest among my international relations colleagues: one, scholarly progress on the institutional front and, two, some exciting work on norms in arms trafficking. In the first group are scholars who study the growing efforts to prevent and combat illicit trafficking. They note that regional organizations like the European Union, the Organization of American States, Mercosur, and the Organization of African Unity, among others, have stepped up their efforts.

These scholars place particular hope in the United Nations to organize conferences and develop protocols against arms manufacturing and trafficking. Several of those exist and they work to some extent. States are increasingly coordinating on regulating legal arms transfer, coordinating arms brokering, marking and tracing firearms, managing weapon stockpiles and destruction of those stockpiles, and collecting arms from civilians.

An even smaller group of scholars is interested in how these regional and international agreements are fostering shared global norms around the excessive and destabilizing accumulation and transfer of small arms and light weapons, in particular, as they cause and exacerbate conflict. These norms include passing more stringent national legislation, implementing better arms transfer licensing systems, enhancing border controls and customs authorities, and improving international information exchange.

In my mind, the most fascinating literature on this topic, which I note is very small, is less interested in international norms against trafficking and more concerned with the normative foundation of the trafficked weapons themselves. Most scholars study trafficking from a rationalist perspective.

These scholars, on the other hand, are interested in weapons as symbols of modernization and sovereignty. They view their production and purchase as signals that states send one another to demonstrate their reputations. If instead we take weapons seriously, not only as tools of destruction but also as sacred symbols, we may gain a better understanding of the role of war in our world view and of the role of the warrior in our cultural ethos.

Ultimately, we may find that to prevent the irrationality of armed conflicts we must first understand the nonrational meanings that we have constructed for our acts of arming and for our armaments themselves. I would like to focus on the relationship between arms — that is, arms as a constituent element of what we might call the American world order or Pax Americana — and American hegemony. And I want to start from the presumption that the intimate place of arms in the making of an American centered world order, a Pax Americana, is profoundly ironic.

After all, President Woodrow Wilson, whom diplomatic historians commonly identify as the founding father of American internationalism, issued fourteen famous points. The interesting question for me as a historian is how did this happen? In the early s, the United States hosts a set of naval conferences intended to reduce naval armaments. The United States also participates in a series of ill-fated disarmament conferences in Geneva that ultimately culminate in an unsuccessful Geneva disarmament conference in Throughout this phase, a movement of historical revisionism concerned with the nefarious relationship between arms and finance in the genesis and waging of World War I animates public intellectuals, policy-makers, and ordinary citizens to take a strong and robust stand against the arms trade.

They give a sense of the animus with which Americans in the s and s viewed the international trade in weapons of war. In , the Nye Committee in Congress convened a series of hearings to examine the relationship between the arms trade, international finance, and U. This mood was manifested perhaps most consequentially in the series of neutrality laws that the Congress passes beginning in that seek to circumscribe future U.

Now, we should acknowledge that the prohibitive turn in U. When a civil war breaks out in Spain in August , the U. Congress quickly places an embargo on U. And the United States, in a sense by imposing an arms embargo, becomes complicit in the overthrow of a liberal democratic republic at the hands of a fascist insurgency. In the late s, the Nazi consolidation of power in Europe pushed the United States to reexamine and reconsider its relationship to the international arms trade.

Instead FDR devises an alternative strategy for aiding Great Britain and countering the Axis powers: he sets the United States up as an arms dealer to the democratic world. This strategy is encapsulated famously in the arsenal of democracy speech that Roosevelt delivers at the end of Cognizant that the American people are not going to tolerate direct U. Of course, Pearl Harbor in December transforms the strategic landscape and makes it possible for the United States to involve itself directly in World War II to counter the military and geopolitical threat of Nazi Germany.

And after the war, arms become an integral modality of American Cold War hegemony. The United States quickly established itself as a guarantor of security to subordinate allies, and these security guarantees are encapsulated most famously in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty of , a clause that commits the United States to the security of its West European allies.

Yet the United States also strives to uphold the security of its allies through the direct provision of weapons of war, through the military assistance program that Congress enacts in the s. The United States throws open the doors of the armory and invites Europeans to take what they need. The only prohibition is on American transfers of nuclear arms to Western Europe, but even here the United States shows some flexibility.

The United States will not sell nuclear weapons to its West European allies, but it does create in the s a variety of schemes for giving West Europeans de facto control over U. Arms in the context of an escalating Cold War become an essential part of the international order. As the Cold War intensifies, the United States assumes on behalf of its allies responsibility for security.

This is a point worth pondering. Security historically in the Westphalian era has been a defining attribute of sovereignty. What makes a state a state is its capacity to protect its citizens against untimely violent death. In the context of an escalating Cold War, the United States will come to exercise this determinative attribute of sovereignty on behalf of its subordinate Cold War allies. The model that is deployed in Europe will be deployed elsewhere in the world.

The United States forms relationships and military cooperation in Latin America and establishes a raft of bilateral security agreements in East Asia. It builds regional security frameworks in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, including in the Middle East. As the Cold War progresses, the retreat of European imperialism from the decolonizing and increasingly postcolonial world pushes the United States to expand its role as a provider of arms.

Arms become increasingly a vital guarantee of regional security and of U. An illustrative case in point will follow the British retreat from military positions east of Suez in After the British decide that they can no longer take responsibility for providing military security in the Persian Gulf, American officials ponder the question of how regional military security in the Persian Gulf region will be assured. The Nixon administration formulates an ad hoc solution whereby the United States will provide weapons of war to Iran and Saudi Arabia, which become the twin pillars of American regional security strategy in the Persian Gulf.

To this end the United States once again throws open the doors of the armory. In a remarkable meeting between the Shah of Iran and the President of the United States, Iran tells the United States that it is willing to purchase any weapons that the United States has to sell.

Of course, we know how this story ends. Iran in the s is a parable cautioning against the pernicious and destabilizing effects of the international trade in arms. However, I am not certain that we would rush to that cautionary conclusion. Let me make three points by way of conclusion. First, we should always be mindful that the decision for a superpower like the United States to withhold participation in the international arms trade is an ethical choice, just as providing arms to weaker powers in the international system is an ethical choice.

Think of Bosnia in the s, for example. The arms embargo that the international community slapped on Bosnia in the context of the Bosnian civil war made it very difficult for the Bosnian government to protect itself and its civilians from vicious and violent attacks staged by internal insurgents with weapons of war provided by rogue powers, the Republic of Serbia most consequentially.

We could also think of Syria since Second, states that lack arms industries depend upon the international arms trade in the twenty-first century in order to be able to exercise what Max Weber defined as a defining attribute of sovereignty, namely, the capacity to exercise legitimate violence. Brian showed in his talk what happens in places like Mexico today, where states lack effective monopolies over the exercise of violence.

Chaos and mayhem can easily ensue. This is a remarkable power and the United States should be very wary of using this power frivolously without due care and consideration. It is also important to remember that the arms trade constitutes a lever of power that can enable the United States to influence in more positive ways the internal conditions of countries that receive arms from the United States. The tethering, for example, of specific human rights conditions to arms deliveries can function as a means to ameliorate human rights depredations in countries that receive weapons of war from the United States.

In Latin America, for example, during the s the tethering of human rights conditions to military assistance may have served to nudge the trajectory for human rights in Argentina in the right direction, just to describe one case.

We should also consider on this point a scenario in which the United States unilaterally restrains its role as a deliverer of weapons to developing societies. Would the world be safer, would developing states be more secure, if the United States ceded this vital lever of power and influence to Russia or China? It is something to think about. Finally, the alternative to U.

Here the Iranian case is instructive. Let us think briefly about what happens in Iran subsequent to the revolution of In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, the Carter administration contemplates how regional military security in the Persian Gulf region will be provided. Bereft of alternatives, the Iranians can no longer be relied upon to police the gulf, and so the Carter administration decides that the United States should adopt and exercise direct responsibility for assuring military security in the Persian Gulf region.

The United States creates a regional military-security architecture that evolves in into U. In the absence of relationships whereby the United States equips allies with responsibility for exercising regional military security, the United States may feel called upon to exercise such military functions on its own. I think we should be aware of the escalating and cascading responsibilities that can ensue from this alternative scenario for security provision.

Let me add that we should always be aware of the costs that arms control can embroil us in. The United States over the long arc of the twentieth century created a hierarchical international order in which arms became a defining modality of international power.

Today such relationships may have metastasized into a political and constitutional crisis that threatens the very fate of the republic itself. After all, the U. Congress in began to appropriate funds to support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia. Since then, Russia has invaded Crimea and supported insurgents in Eastern Ukraine in the Donbass region.