On the Iron River
It was a sad reality check to read Rachel Nolan's review of two books on U.S./Mexican border dynamics in a recent LRB. The fundamental reality is U.S. firearms freely flow into Mexico while drugs flow the opposite direction. Reducing crime and violence in Mexico would require the U.S. to meaningfully reform both the lousy state of public health and the abysmal state of firearms access.
However, this seems impossible when even the agency tasked with enforcement has both hands tied behind its back in a truly absurd manner:
The ATF is not legally permitted to keep a searchable digital database of gun sales, thanks to hysteria that ‘the government will come to take our guns,’ so they only have printouts. When a crime is called in and the ATF is asked to trace a gun’s serial number, it can take a week of rifling through the paperwork to trace the gun. If a gun seller sends in information about sales on a thumb drive, the ATF is required to print out all the data, keep the paper records and destroy the drive.