The guidelines affect New Mexico, California, Arizona, and Texas.

The Justice Department made the argument before a judge after a coalition of gun store owners protested the two-month old rule. Federal lawyers argued before a judge that the restrictions curb the in-flow of weapons to Mexican drug cartels.

From the AP:

It requires sellers in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to give the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives information about purchasers who buy two or more semi-automatic rifles greater than .22 caliber within five days.

Justice Department attorney Daniel Reiss said having a database of multiple purchasers gives ATF agents the power to trace gun sales within minutes, rather than a multi-day effort to trace the weapons back through the manufacturer, to the seller and eventually the buyer. He said two investigations have already been opened in the short time that the new reporting has been required.

“Without these reports it’s very difficult to identify these straw purchasers” who are buying the guns to pass on to the drug cartels, he said.

U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer questioned whether monitoring lawful gun sales is an appropriate way to stop the flow of guns to Mexican gangs. The requirement was imposed amid controversy over ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious which tried to track guns suspected of being bought by straw purchasers back to gun-smuggling ringleaders, who have long eluded law enforcement. But ATF agents lost track of 1,400 of the more than 2,000 guns identified by Fast and Furious as possibly straw purchases.

This is the second time in recent weeks federal government pressed on New Mexico gun regulations.

Earlier, The New Mexico Independent reported on a letter sent to gun store owners by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The owners were instructed to withhold the sale of arms or munitions to anyone suspected of having an interaction or addiction to prescription drugs, including marijuana.

Moreover, the letter affirms the illegality of a medicinal marijuana smoker purchasing weapons. Already, those who seek to purchase firearms or ammunition must fill out ATF Form 4473. Question 11.e. specifically asks: “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?” Answering ‘yes’ legally bars the individual from purchasing guns or ammunition.

The ATF letter several times referred to marijuana as an addictive drug. According to a summary of the book The Science of Marijuana (2008) in Psychology Today, a person’s risk of developing an addiction to marijuana is roughly 9 percent, compared to 33 percent for tobacco users and 15 percent for alcohol users.

Former Gov. Bill Richardson signed Senate Bill 523, known as the Lynn and Erin Compassionate Use Act, into law in September of 2007.

At the time of the passage, Richardson said: “I’m proud to sign legislation that makes patient care an important priority in this state…It is time for Congress and the federal government to follow our lead and help those forced to endure painful, chronic diseases.”

The New Mexico Independent called ATF for clarification on penalties associated with offering misleading information while purchasing a firearm; a response from the bureau is pending. In May, The American Independent wrote on the intense politicking that went into federal officials scrubbing information on the medical benefits of marijuana from a National Institutes of Health database.

For more information about the state’s medical marijuana program, visit the New Mexico Infectious Disease Bureau.

In the operation, agents watched as straw purchasers bought guns from dealers in border states; those guns were then handed to middlemen of Mexican drug gangs. Nearly 2,000 guns were allowed to “walk” across the border for 14 months. Nearly 200 have been recovered at crime scenes in Mexico and two guns were at the scene of the murder of Border Patrolman Brian Terry.

Three supervisors of the operation have received promotions from field offices to Washington.

Melson, who was reassigned to an advising position in the Office of Legal Policy in the Justice Department, is unlikely to be replaced with a permanent director — the agency has been without a permanent director for five years as the process has been held up by a lack of Senate confirmation.

The rule requires gun dealers in Arizona, New Mexico, California and Texas to inform the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) if a person buys more than one semiautomatic rifle that accepts a detachable magazine and uses ammunition greater than .22 caliber within five days.

“These cartels — which are responsible for more than 40,000 deaths since 2006, including Americans like Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry — have various ways of obtaining weapons that don’t include lawful purchases from legitimate gun sellers,” he added.

Mexico has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world — the Washington Postreported on the one gun store in Mexico City on a military base that requires a thorough background check and only allows purchasers to buy one small-caliber weapon. According to the Post, 60,000 American guns have been recovered in Mexico from 2006 to 2010. Straw purchasers without a criminal record often buy from different stores in border states to evade detection.

“Instead of arbitrarily implementing this misguided and constitutionally questionable policy, the Obama administration should target actual criminals rather than law-abiding citizens and immediately secure our southern border against the northbound and southbound illegal smuggling of drugs, humans, cash, guns, fugitives and stolen vehicles,” added Perry.

The statement, translated from Spanish, reads:

In connection with information reported by numerous American and Mexican media outlets on an operation called “Fast and Furious,” conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) of the U.S. Justice Department, the Secretary of Foreign Affairs states the following:

1. Detailed information on this matter has been requested from American authorities.

2. The Mexican Government will follow with special interest the investigations announced by both ATF and the Department of Justice.

3. The aim of the governments of Mexico and the U.S. is to stop the trafficking of firearms on a basis of shared responsibility and to both work to strengthen bilateral cooperation in the field. The Presidents of Mexico and the United States endorsed this priority on March 3rd in Washington, D.C.

The reference to “Fast and Furious” reflects a CBS News report from last week confirming that the project was not just informal policy within the ATF, but that it was fully authorized by the Department of Justice and even given an official name: “Fast and Furious.”

The statement comes at a time when relations between the U.S. and Mexico have ostensibly become slightly less strained after a ratcheting up of tension in recent years over skyrocketing drug cartel-related violence near the border. According to Mexican officials, around 35,000 people in Mexico have died in drug-related violence since December 2006, and while the U.S. is hardly the only source of illegal guns in the country, Mexican officials cannot be happy with a program that saw a U.S. government agency encourage the flow of guns into Mexico. Presidents Obama and Calderón held a joint press event last week in Washington at which they vowed to redouble efforts to mitigate violence in the border region and to end a years-long impasse over cross-border trucking that resulted in retaliatory food tariffs from Mexico, the U.S.’s second largest import market.

Though the Foreign Ministry’s statement alludes to this cooling off, it remains to be seen whether Mexico will be satisfied with the American government’s level of cooperation or the comprehensiveness of the ATF and DOJ internal investigations. Attorney General Eric Holder authorized a preliminary investigation of the practice last week.

Because there is such a wealth of guns seized from drug cartels in Mexico and because the vast majority of them are tampered with as to make their origins unclear, statistics on the percentage of legally-sold American guns that end up in the hands of drug cartels are notoriously unwieldy. Figures range from a still-significant 12 percent to as high as 87 percent, though a percentage quite that high is unlikely, given the growing trend among cartels of using automatic and other military-grade weapons, which are illegal to sell in the U.S. (the discrepancy has arisen because the vast majority of seized weapons are never traced at all). Even those statistics may not tell us much about the actual presence of guns in Mexico, because they’re based on the number of guns seized by law enforcement in Mexico. There’s no telling how many more guns are still on the street, nor where they may have come from.

But a confluence of recent stories from the border region show that there may be bigger issues that need attention than closing gun show loopholes. A CBS News investigation that came out in late February exposed a shocking practice within the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). The story has received little notice except in gun enthusiast circles, who have seized upon it as a sign that ATF is corrupt and that tightening gun ownership restrictions would be pointless.

The CBS story alleges that there is an ongoing practice in the ATF of letting guns “walk”: ignoring and even encouraging licensed gun dealers who sell large quantities of guns to known gunrunners. While the ATF has refused to comment on the story, six former agents and executives who spoke anonymously to CBS said that “Project Gunrunner” agents, who were deployed specifically to stop American guns from being smuggled into Mexico, actually told wary gun dealers to continue selling to questionable buyers. Why? CBS’s sources say that the ATF sent the guns walking so that they could attempt to track them to their destinations and make bigger busts. In practice, however, the guns have proved tremendously difficult to track, and that fact has had fatal consequences for at least one ATF agent.

Agent Brian Terry was patrolling a known smuggling route near the border in Arizona on December 14, 2010, when gunrunners fired on him. He didn’t survive. Two assault rifles found at the scene were traced to a legal purchase by one Jaime Avila, who is now among 20 people indicted for fraud and conspiracy (PDF) by the state of Arizona. Avila and the other 19 named in the indictment are accused of being “straw purchasers,” or middlemen who use their clean criminal records to legally buy guns and then bring them to smuggling rings. Avila and the rest were known to ATF but allowed to proceed with their purchases — 575 in all — under Project Gunrunner.

That name — Jamie Avila — serves as a chilling but wholly coincidental reminder of a very similar, more recent story out of Mexico. On February 15, two Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Jaime Zapata and Victor Avila, were attacked by gunmen in the state of San Luis Potosí. Avila is recovering from his wounds in Texas; Zapata was no so lucky. Following Zapata’s death, an investigation resulted in several arrests, including that of Sergio Antonio Mora, a higher-up in the notorious Los Zetas drug cartel. Three of the other arrests were made in the U.S. Three men arrested in a Dallas suburb have been connected to the murder, but they weren’t gunmen. Like those in the Arizona ring, they are considered straw purchasers in a cartel-connected gunrunning ring. A gun left at the scene of Zapata’s murder was, like so many others involved in cartel violence, traced back to the U.S. It is not known if the gun is among those allowed to “walk” by ATF agents.

iStockphoto

Earlier this year, as the violence on the Mexican border had crescendoed into national headlines, the state of California contacted federal firearms officials with a seemingly innocuous request: Would the federal government lend state law enforcers details on the thousands of crime guns seized in Mexico and traced to California — information that might identify patterns of trafficking worth investigation?

Citing a five-year-old federal law that limits the sharing of crime gun trace data, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives refused.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

“As a result of this restriction,” California’s Department of Justice wrote in a subsequent letter to the head of ATF in Washington, “California law enforcement agencies … have been unable to identify the California firearm dealers whose firearms are finding their way into Mexico’s drug war.”

The Tiahrt Amendment had struck again.

That law — named after its original sponsor, Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kans.) — places sharp restrictions on the ability of ATF to share crime gun trace data that could compromise criminal investigations. Yet, as the California case indicates, it can also prevent law enforcers from reviewing the same information. Critics, including many law enforcement groups, say that the lack of access cripples the power of enforcement officers to pinpoint gun trafficking patterns in efforts to curb the flow of firearms to criminal markets, both national and international.

“We can’t connect the dots to see what we’re dealing with,” said Scott Knight, chief of police in Chaska, Minn., who also chairs the Firearms Committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

One culprit, according to critics, is language in the Tiahrt law that allows law enforcers to tap ATF trace data only in connection with a specific criminal investigation. Broader data sweeps, such as California’s request, don’t make the cut. A similar appeal from the City of Jersey City in 2007 yielded the same response from ATF — our hands, the agency said, are tied by Tiahrt.

Backed by President Obama, Democrats this year are aiming to change that with a proposal eliminating the stipulation that requests for trace data be connected to a specific investigation. If adopted, the change would grant law enforcers access to the entire ATF trace database. The proposal, attached to a bill to fund the Department of Justice next year, passed the House last week.

Gun control advocates are cheering that movement, but are also wondering why Democrats haven’t taken on other elements of the Tiahrt Amendment as well. The Democrats’ proposal, for example, keeps in place the prohibition on public disclosure, which will largely prevent reporters, researchers and advocates from obtaining ATF trace data — information once available through the Freedom of Information Act.

Dennis Henigan, vice president for law and policy at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, wondered if “public,” which isn’t defined in the proposal language, will extend to include policymakers. If the police chief can’t inform the town council of local gun trafficking trends, he said, “that’s still a ridiculous limitation on law enforcement’s ability to actually use the data.”

Researchers are expressing similar concerns. Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University, said the Democrats’ proposal “makes it easier for law enforcement authorities to get ATF data, but simultaneously makes it tougher for researchers to get access.”

The debate is emblematic of the difficulty facing the young Obama administration as it wades into the thorny world of gun reform. On the campaign trail last year, Obama had vowed to repeal the Tiahrt language altogether, and Attorney General Eric Holder has reiterated that wish this year. But the proposal put forth in the White House budget, which mirrors the language now working its way through Congress, represents a nibble rather than a bite. Indeed, Tiahrt’s office has interpreted the administration’s proposal as an endorsement of the larger provision.

“Congressman Tiahrt,” spokeswoman Wendy Knox wrote in an email, “is glad the Obama administration has embraced the Tiahrt trace data amendment.”

That would be news to gun-reform advocates and other Tiahrt critics, who are quick to blast other elements of the amendment that the Democrats’ recent proposal ignores. The Tiahrt law, for example, requires that the FBI destroy background-check records within 24 hours of a gun purchase. By contrast, a Clinton-era gun law allowed government officials to retain gun-purchase records, including the name of the buyer, for up to 90 days in case the purchase was found to have been approved by mistake.

Tiahrt also prohibits ATF from requiring gun dealers to take annual inventory of their stock to determine if guns have been stolen or misplaced.

Supporters of the amendment, including the country’s largest group of sworn law enforcement officers, argue that the Tiahrt restrictions are necessary for keeping police investigations under wraps. “Civilian investigators mucking around without knowledge of what’s going on in the criminal investigation is a very dangerous thing,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, which boasts a membership of 347,000 active-duty police officers.

But the amendment has confounded gun-reform and community advocates, who contend the restrictions are designed to protect gun dealers — even suspect gun dealers — from investigations and lawsuits that might result if trace data were more publicly available. Indeed, after his controversial amendment passed a key committee vote in 2003, Tiahrt was quoted by The Washington Post as saying, “I wanted to make sure I was fulfilling the needs of my friends who are firearms dealers.” The National Rifle Associatiion, he added, was “helpful in making sure I had my bases covered.”

The NRA did not return requests for comment, but a number government reports have fueled the critics’ argument for reform. A report issued last week by the Government Accountability Office, for example, found that, of the guns seized by Mexican authorities in the last five years and traced by ATF, 87 percent originated in the United States.

Another example: In 1998, ATF was able to determine that 57 percent of the crime guns traced that year originated from just 1.2 percent — or 1,020 of the estimated 83,200 — licensed gun sellers. By identifying patterns like that, policymakers and law enforcers can identify potential “bad apple” dealers, who might be feeding criminal markets.

Another indicator crunched by ATF — the so-called time-to-crime measure — reveals time-lapse trends between gun sales and criminal seizures. Guns flowing quickly from legal to illegal status are more likely trafficked by the last licensed seller than those used in a crime many years later.

“This kind of data is very threatening to the gun industry,” said Henigan, author of “Lethal Logic, Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy.”

But public release of such ATF data is a long time coming. The comprehensive report unveiling some of these figures, released by ATF in February 2000, introduced itself as “the first in an annual series.” No similar report has been published since.

The report found that 87 percent of guns seized by Mexican authorities and traced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in the last five years originated from the United States. The critics, however, say the findings are misleading because (1) a majority of guns confiscated in Mexico are never submitted to be traced by the ATF, (2) many of the U.S.-made guns are turning up, not because they’re being smuggled, but because Mexican soldiers are being recruited (with their old, U.S.-made guns) into the more lucrative world of the drug cartels, and (3) some of the semi-automatic weapons that GAO describes as “high-powered” are actually better suited “for shooting prairie dogs and other varmints.”

In this maelstrom arrives a fascinating piece by Mike Melia of the Associated Press, who reported over the weekend that roughly 80 percent of the crime guns seized and traced by Jamaican authorities also originate from the United States — similar findings coming from another independent analysis of another crime-ridden developing country in close proximity to the United States.

Unlike in Mexico, the vast majority of Jamaican guns seized are submitted for tracing.  Jamaica and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives find most of the seized weapons come from three Florida counties — Orange, Dade and Broward — all with large Jamaican populations, according to [Mark Shields, Jamaica's deputy police commissioner].

So there goes the GAO critics’ first argument. U.S. small-arms sales to Jamaica’s tiny military are spare, so the second argument doesn’t hold up very well either. As for the third, well, it’s doubtful that Jamaica has much of a prairie dog problem. Rather, Melia writes that Florida’s “lax” gun laws have simply made it easy for smugglers to buy U.S. weapons and traffic them to the Caribbean.

The U.S. and Jamaica both prohibit the unlicensed transport of guns. But like Mexican smugglers, Jamaican ones depend on lax U.S. gun laws, corrupt customs inspectors and front men acting as buyers. Florida gun laws make it relatively easy to buy a legal firearm, and much of the smuggling is done by family and friends, said Shields, the Jamaican police official.

The results are grisly. “With arsenals to rival police firepower,” Melia writes, “the gangs are blamed for 90 percent of the homicides in Jamaica — 1,611 last year, about 10 times more than the U.S. rate, relative to population.”

(AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi)

The absence of required background checks for private firearm sales, like those made at gun shows, have helped fuel the steady flow of U.S. firearms to Mexico, where thousands of trafficked weapons are ending up in the hands of violent drug cartels, U.S. government investigators revealed last week.

The news has renewed the call among gun-control advocates and some Democratic lawmakers to tighten the nation’s firearms laws to make it more difficult for criminals to buy and smuggle weapons. But faced with opposition from the powerful gun lobby and its congressional supporters, such proposals aren’t likely to get far this year.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Not, as a new government report emphasizes, that there isn’t good reason for lawmakers to take a closer look at current anti-trafficking measures. More than 20,000 firearms confiscated by Mexican authorities and traced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in the past five years originated in the United States, according to a report released Thursday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Those guns, representing 87 percent of all the ATF-traced weapons seized in Mexico over that span, are trafficked primarily to arm the increasingly violent wave of Mexican drug runners, GAO reported, citing statements from the ATF.

A significant but unknown number of those firearms, researchers found, are likely purchased from gun shows and other private sales, where unlicensed dealers are permitted to sell weapons without performing background checks on prospective buyers. Such checks, which are required of licensed dealers, are designed to prevent sales to those legally ineligible to own guns, including felons, illegal immigrants and the severely mentally ill.

“[A]s a result,” GAO reported, “many firearms trafficked to Mexico may be purchased through these types of transactions by individuals who may want to avoid background checks and records of their firearms purchases.”

The GAO’s findings provide a big boost to Democratic lawmakers pushing legislation to close the so-called gun-show loophole. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is a chief sponsor of such a bill. In an email, she said the loophole creates a situation in which “anybody can buy any number of weapons at a gun show and smuggle them south of the U.S. border.”

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Western Hemisphere Subcommittee who commissioned the investigation, also weighed in, professing “hope that this GAO report lends urgency to Congress taking up this legislation.”

There’s evidence that the gun-smuggling issue is one demanding precisely that. Jess Ford, GAO’s director of trade and international affairs, told House lawmakers Friday that many of the U.S.-originated guns are powerful, AK- and AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles. And the firepower is taking its toll. Between 2007 and 2008, drug-related killings in Mexico jumped from roughly 2,700 to more than 6,200.

“Available evidence indicates a large proportion of the firearms fueling Mexican drug violence originated in the United States,” Ford told members of the Western Hemisphere subpanel, “including a growing number of increasingly lethal weapons.”

But Feinstein, Engel and other gun-reform supporters might not want to hold their breath for change anytime soon. Legislation to close the gun-show loophole has been introduced as long ago as 1999, following the shooting deaths of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School near Denver. In the wake of that tragedy, the Senate was able to pass the bill, but it was killed during subsequent negotiations with the House.

The reason is no mystery. The gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association, is among the strongest forces in Washington, doling out millions of dollars in political donations each year and maintaining the constant, if unspoken, threat to attack those lawmakers so bold as to buck the group’s legislative wishes. The NRA went after Obama on the campaign trail last year, for example, dedicating $15 million to portray the Democrat as a threat to Second Amendment Rights. A similar campaign against Al Gore eight years earlier is often credited as a central reason the former Tennessee senator didn’t win his home state in that election.

NRA’s political action committee spent roughly $15.6 million on campaign activities in the 2008 election cycle alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The results are tangible. Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.), a member of the Foreign Affairs subpanel, was quick to blast the GAO report Friday, pointing out that the 87-percent figure represents only those guns that were traced, not all that were seized.

“I don’t know that the report itself is something we should put a lot of value in,” Mack said.

The skepticism is merited in at least one regard: The capacity of the Mexican authorities to process all of their gun seizures leaves plenty of room for improvement. In 2008 only about 25 percent of the crime guns confiscated by Mexican authorities were sent to ATF for tracing, GAO reported. Still, in a phone interview Friday, Ford said there’s nothing to indicate that U.S.-sourced guns couldn’t constitute a significant portion of the 75 percent left unexamined, but “we don’t know because they weren’t traced.”

It’s not only Republicans who are standing behind the NRA to oppose any gun reforms. Earlier this year, when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder suggested publicly that the expired assault weapons ban should be reinstated, 65 House Democrats wrote a scathing letter to the White House condemning the proposal.

The NRA did not respond to a call for comment, but the group’s influence has been evidenced already several times this year. Indeed, when Senate Democrats in February passed legislation granting the District of Columbia a voting representative in Congress, they couldn’t prevent Republicans from first attaching language scrapping most of the district’s strict gun-control laws. Recognizing that the bill will pass if it hits the House floor, Democratic leaders in the lower chamber have refused to consider the proposal. In the meantime, of course, Washington residents continue to lack a voting member of Congress.

In another controversial episode, Republicans last month successfully altered a credit card reform bill by adding an amendment eliminating the decades-old prohibition on loaded weapons in the country’s national parks. Rather than let the gun provision be the poison pill that killed the consumer-friendly credit card reforms, Democrats passed the entire package, with President Obama signing the measure into law last month.

There are other obstacles. Because unlicensed firearm sales at gun shows and elsewhere go undocumented, there’s no good way for ATF to determine exactly how many of the U.S.-originated guns seized in Mexican stings were smuggled following a private sale.

“Unlicensed sales, by definition, have no records attached to them,” said Doug Pennington, spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “So there’s no way to know.”

An absence of publicly available data on crime-gun patterns is another factor complicating efforts to gauge the frequency with which criminals exploit the gun-show loophole to buy weapons. At one time, ATF published public reports analyzing gun trafficking trends, including a breakdown of the sources of illegal firearms. Many experts, including the National Academy of Sciences, say the data offered a useful guide to congressional lawmakers and other policymakers as they fought to keep guns away from criminals. But ATF hasn’t produced such a report since 2000, citing a five-year-old law — known as the Tiarht amendment, after its sponsor Rep. Todd Tiarht (R-Kan.) — which prohibits the ATF from sharing crime-gun trace data with the public.

“It was the easiest way to point out to the public: This is how the illegal gun market works,” said Pennington of the Brady Campaign.

It’s unclear why ATF didn’t issue updates to its 2000 report in the years before the Tiarht rules took hold, but those restrictions were relaxed in 2008, allowing specifically for ATF to issue aggregate statistical data. According to GAO, ATF officials are “considering” an update to the 2000 report.

On the campaign trail, Obama vowed to eliminate the Tiahrt amendment. His proposed 2010 budget, however, doesn’t go that far, only proposing to allow ATF to share its gun-tracing data more broadly with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.

Meanwhile, gun-policy reformers are hoping the revelation that 20,000 guns smuggled from the United States into Mexico in recent years have turned up in criminal investigations south of the border will begin turning more heads on Capitol Hill.

“That’s a huge problem we’re not even trying to solve,” Pennington said. “Not even thinking about it.”