MEXICO CITY — The only gun shop in all of Mexico is behind a fortresslike wall on a heavily guarded military base.
To enter the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales, customers must undergo months of background checks — six documents are required — and then be frisked by uniformed soldiers.
The army-run store on the outskirts of Mexico City embodies the country’s cautious approach to firearms, and a visit here illustrates the dramatically different ways two neighboring countries view guns, legally and culturally.
Like the Second Amendment in the United States, Mexico’s Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms, but it also stipulates that federal law “will determine the cases, conditions, requirements and places” of gun ownership. For many Mexicans, even those who love guns, the thought of an unfettered right to owning one is perplexing.
Yet on this issue, like so many aspects of life in Mexico, the influence of its powerful neighbor to the north is keenly felt: Each day the army gun store sells on average just 38 firearms to civilians, while an estimated 580 weapons are smuggled into Mexico from the United States.
That paradox is increasingly relevant given Mexico’s unprecedented level of gun violence, which has claimed more than 100,000 lives over the last decade. Last year was Mexico’s deadliest since the government began releasing homicide statistics in 1997. This year, it is on track to surpass that record.
American firearms are directly driving the violence, although U.S. appetites for drugs and rampant corruption among Mexican officials also play a role. About 70 percent of guns recovered by Mexican law enforcement officials from 2011 to 2016 were originally purchased from legal gun dealers in the United States, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Mexican leaders have long complained about the phenomenon. In 2012, then-President Felipe Calderon erected a giant billboard in the border city of Juarez that spelled out the phrase “No more weapons.” The letters, formed using crushed firearms seized by authorities, were visible from Texas.
Most trafficked guns are purchased in the U.S. from one of the country’s more than 67,000 licensed gun dealers or at gun shows, which unlike stores often do not require buyers to present identification or submit to background checks.
By contrast, would-be gun owners in Mexico must offer a birth certificate and proof that they are employed, and have no criminal record. The atmosphere at the directorate is more sterile than a U.S. gun store or pawnshop. There are no moose heads on the wall and no promotional specials. Guns stamped with the army’s logo are kept in locked cases and customers aren’t given the chance to heft a rifle to their shoulder to see how it feels.
Buyers spend hours shuffling between different counters to get their paperwork processed, waiting for long stretches under fluorescent lights in uncomfortable chairs. It feels a bit like the Department of Motor Vehicles, until one notices the no-nonsense army colonel running things and the machine-gun-toting soldiers patrolling the aisles.
The store manager, Col. Eduardo Tellez, said he believes gun ownership is a privilege. He sees his job as making sure firearms end up in the hands of “moral and responsible” people only.
Current law allows citizens one handgun and up to nine rifles if they can prove they are members of shooting or hunting clubs. A separate permit that is difficult to obtain is required to carry the guns in public.
Hugo Gallegos Sanchez, 32, a police officer in Mexico City, decided to purchase a handgun at the store for personal use because he was concerned about rising crime.
“You need protection,” Gallegos said.
He spent months waiting for his paperwork to be approved, but said he was happy to wait. Proper screening for gun owners is important, said Gallegos, who said he also supports Mexico’s ban on heavy assault weapons.
“A civilian shouldn’t be able to have the same power as the military,” he said.
Whereas Mexican leaders have long groused about firearms trafficked from the north, U.S. gun control advocates have only recently begun to highlight the impact of lax American gun laws on Mexico and other countries.
“We have such a serious domestic problem that it can be hard to get any oxygen related to international drug trafficking,” said Chelsea Parsons, an expert at the Center for American Progress who recently co-wrote a report detailing the impact of American guns on Mexico. The report found that 66 percent of Mexico’s homicides were committed with a gun in 2017, up from 15 percent in 1997.
In recent months, Mexican leaders have again seized on the issue, in part to counter headlines about the country’s spiraling violence and President Trump’s complaints that Mexico isn’t doing enough to stop the northward flow of migrants and drugs.
President Enrique Pena Nieto brought the issue up at a news conference with Trump shortly before the 2016 presidential election, blaming the influx of U.S. firearms for “strengthening the cartels and other criminal organizations that create violence in Mexico.” Candidates vying to replace him in Mexico’s July 1 presidential race are also using it as a rallying cry.
“Instead of threatening walls, instead of threatening to militarize the border, we demand that they stop the flow of arms from the United States to Mexico,” Ricardo Anaya of the National Action Party said recently in the violence-ridden border state of Tamaulipas.
Front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the National Regeneration Movement has demanded a new investigation into the defunct Fast and Furious program, under which U.S. federal agents allowed guns to be purchased illegally in the hope of tracing them to leaders of Mexican drug cartels. Jose Antonio Meade of the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, has called for construction of a “technological border” that would detect vehicles crossing into Mexico with guns.
Gun control advocates on both sides of the border say Mexican leaders should also push the government to do a better job of ensuring that guns issued to police and soldiers don’t fall into the hands of criminals, which many often do.
They are also concerned about a new Trump administration proposal to deregulate the export of American guns by putting the Commerce Department in charge of the application process instead of the State Department, which advocates say is better suited to weigh the possible risks of firearm sales against any benefits.
The proposed rule change has long been sought by gun companies eager for easier access to international markets, but advocates worry it could put more guns in the hands of corrupt governments.
U.S. Rep. Norma Torres, D-Calif., introduced a bill that would limit the impact of such a change, as well as legislation that would make gun trafficking a federal crime, which it currently is not. Torres said she has not sought to draw attention to her work to stop arms trafficking because she is wary of pushback from gun industry groups such as the National Rifle Assn.
“This shouldn’t be a controversy,” she said in a recent telephone interview. “It should be about how do we help Mexico deal with its violence.”
She said Mexican authorities frequently raise the issue of gun trafficking in meetings with American officials.
“It’s something they bring up in every conversation,” Torres said. Reducing the flow of guns south, she said, “is something we should do if we care about our relationship with Mexico.”
Back at the gun store in Mexico City, gun enthusiast Fausto Gerard was helping a friend buy a rifle. Gerard works for a Slovakian gun manufacturer, Grand Power, that sells guns to the Mexican military. He is the silent partner in a gun store in the U.S. He is passionate about bringing the sport of target shooting to Mexico.
Still, he thinks limits are OK.
“It’s good to have liberties, but there has to be a mechanism for control,” he said. He said he would support even more restrictions, including screening for mental illness among gun buyers.
But he thinks Mexico could do more to encourage people to buy guns legally. Having just one gun store in the entire country is impractical, he said. It might even encourage people to buy firearms coming in from the United States.
“In Tijuana or Juarez,” he said, “it’s much easier buying a gun on the black market.”
But he can’t just walk into a store and buy one. Instead, he is sitting through a mandatory four-hour lecture on the history and physics of the firearm.
This is Iceland — the gun-loving nation that hasn’t experienced a gun-related murder since 2007.
“For us, it would be really strange if you could get a license to buy a gun and you had no idea how to handle it,” says Garðarsson, 28, a mechanical engineer. “I would find it very odd if [a gun owner] had never even learned which is the pointy end and which is the trigger end.”Iceland is a sparsely populated island in the northern Atlantic. Its tiny population of some 330,000 live on a landmass around the size of Kentucky.
St. Louis, Missouri, which has a population slightly smaller than Iceland’s, had 193 homicides linked to firearms last year.
Icelanders believe the rigorous gun laws on this small, remote volcanic rock can offer lessons to the United States.
“The system here works,” said Gunnar Rúnar Sveinbjörnsson, a flip-flop-wearing spokesman for Reykjavik’s police department. “We would be glad to help.”
Like many outside the U.S., Sveinbjörnsson struggles to comprehend the extent of American gun violence.
“It’s just madness,” he says. “We just cannot understand why this isn’t stopped and why something isn’t being done.”
No other country in the developed world comes close to the U.S. when it comes to gun ownership, gun homicides, mass shootings and police killings.
After the February mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the “Enough is Enough” movement led to laws tightening gun restrictions in the state, including raising the legal age to buy a gun to 21. But that has not been repeated in other states nor on a national level.
In many places in the U.S., it’s still possible to buy a semi-automatic rifle in minutes with only patchy background checks.
Gun control advocates in the U.S. sometimes point to countries such as Japan, where strict laws and a pacifist culture mean there are very few guns, and as a result very few gun deaths.
But guns are everywhere in Iceland, about one for every three people, and many here are staunch advocates of their right to own a firearm.
“There’s nothing wrong with the gun,” said Jóhann Vilhjálmsson, a gunsmith in Reykjavik, echoing a favorite argument of the National Rifle Association. “The gun kills nothing, you know? It’s the person who is holding onto the gun.”
The last gun killing here was 11 years ago, and there have only been four in the past two decades, according to GunPolicy.org, a project run by Australia’s University of Sydney.
It would be misleading to suggest that the model in Iceland — a small country where income inequality is low — could be seamlessly transposed onto the U.S.
Most guns here are used for hunting or competitive shooting. Crime of any nature is so infrequent that few if anyone argues that they need to own a weapon for self-defense.
“The system in the U.S. is so different to the one we have here,” says Sveinbjörnsson, the police spokesman.
But what’s clear is how seriously all Icelanders take the responsibility that comes with owning a deadly weapon.
That’s why Garðarsson, the mechanical engineer and hopeful gun-owner, is currently sitting in a Reykjavik hotel conference room learning about the ins and outs of his weapon of choice.
He came here with his girlfriend, Jóhanna Einarsdóttir, 26, a teacher who also wants a gun. There are about three dozen others in attendance, all listening intently to the seminar covering firearm history, physics, laws, hunting and safety.
This is only one step in a meticulously regulated journey.
Candidates are examined by a doctor who checks they are in good physical and mental health.
They have a meeting with the chief of police, who asks them why they want to own a gun and runs a background check to make sure they have no criminal record.
Then comes the lecture, followed by a written test the next day that they have to pass with a grade of 75 percent or higher.
The final part is a day-long practice session at a shooting range outside the capital. Here, against the backdrop of snow-capped mountains, they blast at bright-orange targets fired into the sky by a machine.
“It feels like somebody cares that you’re getting a gun and what you’re going to do with the gun,” Garðarsson says at his apartment on the outskirts of Reykjavik. “So you’re not going to buy a gun to do stupid things.”
If they pass, he and his girlfriend will have been studying and preparing for around 13 months.
And that’s just for a small rifle or a pump-action shotgun. Owning a handgun, for example, can take around three to four years, and semi-automatic rifles are all but banned.
Garðarsson hopes to finish the tests and start practicing his aim in time for winter.
“In my girlfriend’s family, there’s a tradition to eat ptarmigan for Christmas ,” he says, referring to the small bird native to northern Europe, Canada and Alaska. “Now, finally, we can be the ones that bring the bird to the table.”
Iceland’s modern peace contrasts with the violent past of this land of fire and ice.
It sits on the shifting boundary between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, formed by spewing lava and carved by colossal glaciers.
It was first settled by Norwegian Viking outlaws in the 9th century, but plagues, volcanic eruptions and inhospitable weather meant it has remained one of the most sparsely populated countries on earth.
And like many countries in Europe, most police here are unarmed.
Only specialist units, like the Viking Squad, Iceland’s version of a SWAT team, can carry guns and even then, they are kept in locked boxes that require senior approval to open.
Since the Icelandic police was established in 1803, its officers have only shot and killed one person. This was in 2013, and afterward the police chief, Haraldur Johannessen, said he was “deeply saddened” and apologized to the victim’s family.
Iceland is part of NATO but has no standing army. From this perspective, the idea of allowing ordinary people to buy military-grade weapons such as the infamous AR-15 seems “crazy, absolutely crazy,” according to Icelandic lawyer Ívar Pálsson.
“When you have an automatic gun in your home, anybody can access it, your children or anyone else,” he says.
Pálsson is responsible for giving one of the lectures that leads up to the gun exam. Vilhjálmsson, the city gunsmith, gives another, as well as the tests at the shooting range. The entire process is administered by the Environment Agency of Iceland.
Like his fellow classmates, Garðarsson now has to wait to see if he has passed. If not, it might be annoying to hit the books again but he believes Iceland should never consider adopting a more American-style regime.
“That people can go into a store and buy a gun, it’s ridiculous for me,” he says. “If something snaps in his head then he’s able to do it in just one hour — go to a store, buy a gun, go to a guy he’s angry at and shoot him.”
Mad Tatafo 