"Gun dealers rarely charged in trafficking plots," and "Obama's other surge."

Here is an excerpt from the first article by Dane Schiller in The Houston Chronicle:

"One guy was an unemployed machinist who lived with his parents, but spent $24,800 in a year at Houston gun stores, snapping up military-style weapons for a Mexican drug cartel. His accused gun-running associate dropped $42,700 in a year, as did another who spent $27,700 in two months. Each often shopped at the same stores, according to court records. Ten alleged buyers were indicted and arrested last week, part of an investigation of as many as 23 people who spent $366,400 during a 15-month period that ended in 2007. Two of them, including the machinist, have pleaded guilty. But the dealers who sold the guns, are not accused of wrongdoing. The law says they did nothing wrong, even if they wondered, for example, why a customer in one pop would pay cash for five civilian variants of the M-16 assault rifle used by the military. 'Technically, they don’t have to do anything unless they suspect something is wrong,' Franceska Perot, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Houston division said. 'Unless they knew where the guns were going, it is not a crime on the part of the dealer.' Less than 1 percent of dealers nationwide are ever charged with a crime, according to the ATF. Most gun dealers are law abiding, authorities said. Proving they knowingly engaged in a criminal plot is especially tough." Link to Full Article

Here is an excerpt from the second article by Todd Bensman on GlobalPost.com:

"As open warfare between rival drug cartels filled the streets of Nuevo Laredo with bodies, Armando and Diana Villarreal, owners of Mando’s, prospered from a sharp sudden spike in demand for AK-47 semiautomatic assault rifles... Federal agents, though, eventually traced more than 50 AK-47s recovered after battles in Nuevo Laredo to Mando’s. In October 2006, Villarreal died of cancer just before federal prosecutors could make an example of him as perhaps the first federally licensed firearms dealer to be indicted for crossing the legal line into weapons trafficking, U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives officials confirm. There have been no publicly known successful gun-smuggling prosecutions of licenced retail gun dealers since... America's gun retailers will continue to enjoy some measure of insulation because of scant legal requirements on sales, as well as a high burden of proof that a retailer actually knows ahead of time where the guns are headed." Link to Full Article

Analysis: Both of these articles accomplish more or less the same thing, and that's to point out three major issues when it comes to southbound weapons trafficking: the straw-purchase system the Mexican DTOs have going is a pretty darn good system - for them, anyway; proving complicity by a US gun dealer in weapons trafficking is very difficult; the large majority of US gun dealers are honest, cooperative, and concerned about the potential for their guns to be used in crimes south of the border.

So how much responsibility (or blame) should be placed on US gun dealers to prevent the sale of guns to straw buyers? How many AK-47s sold to the same individual(s) should be considered suspicious? Where should the line be drawn between making a profit and losing business over possibly baseless suspicions? Gun sellers are not cops or investigators. However, taking the initiative these days to be more alert to suspicious buying behavior is probably in the best interest of gun sellers; not because it's become any easier to implicate them in criminal activity, but because it's always possible they may have less guns they can legally sell if the southbound weapons flow doesn't slow down soon.

I firmly believe the focus of law enforcement efforts with regards to this issue needs to be on the straw buyers, and to maintain that cooperation with gun dealers. Both the articles state and my ATF contacts confirm that the number of gun dealers knowingly and actively involved in illegal sales to Mexican DTO associates is extremely small. In the law enforcement world, when you have limited resources and personnel, you go with the numbers - tackle your larger problems first, and deal with the smaller ones later. The larger problem in this case is dirty buyers, not dirty sellers.