Opinion

Granderson: Mexico's gun crisis is our fault. Victims deserve their day in U.S. court.

LZ Granderson
Tue, October 8, 2024 

When vigilantes and criminals face off in Mexico, both sides are armed with arsenals of U.S.-made military-style guns. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

The Supreme Court is back at work this week, and among the more important arguments the justices are set to hear is a lawsuit filed by the government of Mexico against American gun manufacturers. A data leak from the Mexican military indicated that more than 90% of the firearms found at crime scenes in Mexico between 2018 and 2022 originated in the United States. We’re talking more than 78,000 guns seized in a country where only two stores sell firearms.

It’s clear American weaponry contributes to the migrant crisis in Central America and to the bloodshed at the U.S.-Mexico border, much in the way secondhand smoke affects the lungs of nonsmokers.

So for Mexico, this lawsuit isn’t a question of guilt but of accountability.

Read more: Granderson: 'Blame Mexico' won't solve the crises of guns and fentanyl

The gun-tracing data in the leak is so comprehensive that Mexican officials know Kentucky, a state roughly 1,300 miles away, produces one of the cartels’ favorite weapons: the Anderson Manufacturing AM-15.

Mexico is also able to identify Americans who have a bad habit of buying guns that end up in the hands of the cartel.

Read more: Opinion: The border crisis factor no one talks about: American guns

For example, of the 95 semiautomatic rifles purchased in a two-month span by one man in Texas, 66 ended up being seized in Mexico. That gun trafficker spent six months in prison for lying on his firearms forms. The families of those guns’ victims are left to spend the rest of their lives in anguish.

Mexico’s lawsuit seeks billions in damages, alleging that manufacturers knowingly supply the weapons in this ecosystem.

Read more: Guerrero: Don't shield U.S. gun makers from liability for Mexico's gun violence

Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti famously said “it is easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick: start your story from ‘Secondly.’ ” That is certainly a parlor trick modern Republicans turn to when it comes to migrants from Central America or the gun violence in Mexico. Notice, you never hear Donald Trump or his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, bring up the $30 billion in "reparations" the formerly enslaved in Haiti were forced to pay to France or the shambles created in that country by U.S. occupation.

While “the Supreme Court that Donald Trump built” has gifted the gun lobby with numerous favorable rulings, it isn’t clear whether the conservative justices will let the suit continue or not. Earlier this year, the court upheld a federal law banning domestic abusers from owning a firearm.

Read more: Op-Ed: For Mexico, taking a stand against gun trafficking is a moral imperative

Hopefully that display of common sense isn’t a one-off.

Allowing Mexico to sue manufacturers not only potentially helps victims and their families, but also provides the United States an opportunity to revisit the series of gun laws pushed through after Sept. 11 — a series that opened the floodgates to mass shootings right here at home.

Starting with the Patriot Act in 2001 — which allowed the federal government to collect personal information about just about anything except buying guns and ammo — the George W. Bush administration used our lingering fear of terrorism to shield the gun industry from accountability under the guise of national security.

In 2003, the Tiahrt Amendment made it illegal to share gun crime tracing data with the public and shielded gun shop owners from scrutiny. In 2004, a 10-year federal ban on assault rifles expired. In 2005, the Republican-controlled Congress and then-President George W. Bush shielded the industry from liability lawsuits. In 2006, Bush introduced Operation Wide Receiver, which allowed hundreds of American guns to “walk” into Mexico in hopes of catching traffickers.

It didn’t work.

And today — more than a decade later — Mexican law enforcement is still recovering weapons from that program, as well as a similar gun-walking program President Obama greenlighted called Fast and Furious.

As I said earlier, this case is about accountability.

U.S. active shooter data going back to 2000 found that shooters with a semiautomatic weapon wound and kill twice as many people as those with non-automatic weapons. Seems like common sense, but then again common sense would have led Congress to extend the 10-year ban on assault weapons. Instead, elected officials listened to the National Rifle Assn.

Today, many point to the ban expiring in 2004 as the turning point in gun violence in America. I agree with the year but not for the same reason. For me, it’s the $2.5 million that Bushmaster Firearms International was ordered in 2004 to pay to relatives of the 2002 sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C., area. It was one of the largest settlements up to that point. Following the Columbine massacre in 1999, lawsuits against gun manufacturers became more common. The NRA had been lobbying Congress for shielding gunmakers from such lawsuits for years — arguing the payouts would bankrupt manufacturers — to no avail. However, with Bush in office, the manufacturers were finally able to get immunity. Though surely no one else feels immune to the harms of gun violence.

If the Supreme Court wants to make America great again, it could start by allowing Mexico its day in court.

@LZGranderso

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.