AUSTIN, Texas – President Trump’s recent deal with Mexico has that country deploying 10,000 troops to the border. But America’s commitments in agreement have gone insufficiently examined.
“For the first time, the U.S. government will work jointly to avoid the entry of guns to Mexico,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced to reporters.
That promise is in response to a years-old narrative that America’s love affair with guns helped create Mexican cartel monsters who poison Americans with fentanyl. This claim has been relentlessly advanced by Democratic lawmakers and progressive gun-control advocates. Trump’s recent concession to work on the “problem” has added heft to Mexico’s claim that it has nothing to do with its own cartel crisis—as when Mexico recently filed a $10 billion lawsuit against American gun manufacturers for allegedly turning a blind eye to gun smugglers.
“If you want to stop the trafficking of fentanyl to the U.S., if you want to stop the violence that’s leading to a lot of migration across the border, you’re going to need to stop the flow of guns to Mexico because that’s what’s leading to all these problems,” said Jonathan Lowy, an attorney representing the Mexican government in the case.
But this storyline has not aged well. It is so incomplete and devoid of up-to-date context as to qualify as an unproven claim at best, and a flagrant falsehood at worst.
