From the Other Side: A Country in Arms

Last month a handful of senators defeated a proposal to regulate the sale and possession of firearms in the U.S. The defeat was aimed at President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, who led an arduous campaign to get Congress to pass this law. Nonetheless, 90 percent of U.S. citizens are concerned about the indiscriminate sale of weapons and as a result supported this proposal.

The concern with firearms is not based only on the murder of 26 people — 20 of them children — in a small town in Connecticut last December, nor on the killing of 12 people in a Colorado movie theater last year, nor the slaughter of 33 people at Virginia Tech University three years ago. Instead, according to information from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, it has to do with there being 129,000 sites licensed to sell firearms, with no major restrictions to acquire them in the U.S. The number is staggering when one considers that there are only 36,000 grocery stores or 14,000 McDonald’s fast food restaurants. The major difference here is that firearms are not perishable and cannot be consumed.

There is no exact data on the number of guns in the U.S., but it is estimated that there are approximately 300 million. According to the ATF, in 2011, 5.5 million weapons were produced; of that number, 95 percent were used in domestic consumption, while 3 million were imported in the same period. The FBI reports that these weapons have been responsible for 48,000 murders between 2006 and 2010. The only possible explanation as to why lawmakers rejected a law that would lead to a decrease in these crimes has to do with the millions of people these weapons manufacturers employ, which undoubtedly influences the vote of some congressmen. For example, the National Rifle Association is a very influential organization.

Therefore, it was absurd that the few lawmakers from states that represent less than 20 percent of the total U.S. population voted against gun control legislation, which affects the other 80 percent of the U.S. population. The fact remains that there is an increasingly dysfunctional democracy which cannot meet the needs of its citizens. Society must wait for another massacre and then somehow the handful of senators who struck down the gun control legislation may feel jointly responsible.

With all of this occurring, how then can the U.S. government stop the flow of arms to countries like Mexico?