Mexico celebrated the approval this Friday of the most important arms control law in the United States in decades and anticipated that it will favor a lawsuit filed against large manufacturers in that country, said the foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard.
“It’s going to help us a lot to reduce the illicit trafficking of arms to our country, which is enormous today, and it’s also going to help us in the argument that we present before the Court in Massachusetts against those who manufacture arms and are negligent” said the chancellor.
With the new legislation, the United States Congress broke a three-decade stalemate on gun regulation, a hot topic for both conservatives and liberals at a time when mass shootings are commonplace in that country.
The Mexican lawsuit against eight major US arms producers, filed in August last year, accuses those companies of engaging in reckless trade that facilitates their illegal trafficking to Mexican drug cartels.
Ebrard reported that the new US legislation establishes the illicit trafficking of weapons to other countries as a federal crime, an issue that fully affects Mexico, which shares more than 3,000 km of border with the United States, he explained.
“It means that as of the entry into force of this law that they approved, it will be possible to commit this crime to those people or companies that participate in any way in illicit trafficking, as I have already pointed out, to our country,” he added. Mexican foreign minister.
“As less weapons are available, we will also have less violence. This is good news,” Ebrard stressed.
The lawsuit, unprecedented in the history of these neighboring countries, has been supported as amicus curiae (friends of the court) by 26 US district attorneys, in addition to Belize and Barbuda, and fourteen other federal states.
The gun manufacturers sued are Smith & Wesson, Barrett Firearms, Beretta, Century International, Colt’s Manufacturing, Glock Inc, Witmer Public Safety Group, and Sturm, Ruger & Co.
The Mexican Foreign Ministry estimates that more than half a million weapons enter its territory illegally from the United States every year.