Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R), who was set to host the conference last year but canceled it after the Mexican governors announced they would boycott the state due to the immigration enforcement law S.B. 1070, had originally said she would attend the conference this year but backed out at the last minute. The Christian Science Monitor reports Brewer’s absence means a potential confrontation between the governors over S.B. 1070 has been avoided:

[Brewer] was to partake in discussions over two days that center on economic development, border security, and international ports of entry.

Although SB 1070 was not on the conference agenda, the participating governors from Mexico still “personally reject it,” as do many Mexican citizens, says Martin Cota, a spokesman for Baja California Governor José Guadalupe Osuna Millán.

Gun trafficking will also be on the agenda, according to the Monitor, a salient issue in the wake of Operation Fast and Furious, a gun-surveillance sting run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that allowed hundreds of guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartel members.

The office of California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) said he was unable to attend due to legislative concerns, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) is attending multiple fundraisers for his presidential campaign in anticipation of tomorrow’s deadline for the candidates’ to file campaign finance reports. Perry was the only absent governor not to send representatives to the conference.

“Conversations about border issues between Texas and other states and the federal government are ongoing,” Perry spokeswoman Lucy Nashed told AP. ”Whether or not someone is attending border governors’ conferences.”

Martinez will host next year’s conference in Albuquerque.

The sellers are exploiting an enormous loophole in the nation’s gun laws. While federal statute requires licensed gun dealers to perform background checks on all prospective gun buyers, unlicensed sellers — like those who often set up shop at roaming gun shows — are exempt. The background checks are designed to prevent sales to those legally ineligible to own guns, including felons, illegal immigrants and the severely mentally ill.

Federal law does prohibit unlicensed dealers from making sales if they have reason to believe that the buyer wouldn’t pass a background check. Yet in 19 of 30 cases, investigators were sold weapons even after they’d made comments indicating that they would likely fail such a test. “That’s good about the background check because I probably couldn’t pass one,” says one undercover buyer. The smiling dealer responded, “I wouldn’t pass either, bud.”

The loophole can have fatal consequences. The Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms estimates that 30 percent of all trafficked guns originate at gun shows. The issue is particularly a concern in places like New York, where shootings and gun trafficking are endemic. ATF investigations have also revealed that weapons purchased freely at gun shows are also making their way into Mexico, where violent cartels are using them to protect their drug trade.

“The gun show loophole is a deadly serious problem,” Bloomberg said in a statement, “and this undercover operation exposes just how pervasive and serious it is.” The mayor said he plans to send a copy of the findings to every member of Congress.

He has a difficult road ahead. While some Democrats have, for years, had their eyes on closing the gun show loophole, the gun lobby has proven too powerful to get the legislation through Congress. Indeed, even in the wake of the 1999 Columbine killings, the National Rifle Association was successful in killing a Senate-passed bill to close the gun show loophole. If that political environment wasn’t electric enough to pass the legislation, it’s hard to imagine that a few videos — as compelling as they are — would inspire in lawmakers a change of heart.

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.”