US to monitor arms sales near Mexico border

WASHINGTON: The US government will now require gun dealers in states along the Mexican border to report large sales of powerful firearms in a bid to curb the flow of weapons to Mexican drug gangs.

The move, announced Monday, comes after Mexican authorities have long said that powerful drug cartels take advantage of lax US gun laws to arm themselves for turf wars that have killed thousands of people in recent years.

The regulations would require gun sellers in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas to notify federal authorities when they sell multiple semiautomatic rifles of a caliber higher than .22 to the same person within five days, Deputy Attorney General James Cole said in a statement.

Such weapons are "highly sought after by dangerous drug trafficking organizations and frequently recovered at violent crime scenes near the Southwest Border," Cole said.

He said the new regulations would help authorities to "detect and disrupt the illegal weapons trafficking networks responsible for diverting firearms from lawful commerce to criminals and criminal organizations."

US authorities have said the measures will not infringe on the Second Amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees a right to bear arms and is defended by the National Rifle Association (NRA), a powerful lobbying group.

The decision comes amid public outrage over "Fast and Furious," a US program that aimed to use guns to track down cartel leaders and allowed hundreds of weapons to be smuggled into Mexico in 2009 and 2010.

The disclosure of the program, operated by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, infuriated Mexico, which has said that 90 percent of weapons seized from drug traffickers come from its neighbor to the north.

President Barack Obama has said neither he nor Attorney General Eric Holder authorized the program and promised that consequences would flow from a Justice Department investigation.

A report released last month by three senators said that 70 percent of the illegal weapons seized in Mexico in 2009 and 2010 came from the United States, most of them sold in US border states.

Mexico has been gripped by drug-related violence that has killed some 37,000 people since 2006, when the government launched a military crackdown on the cartels.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011