“The youth will remember this as a time of war. Their DNA is tattooed with bullets and guns and blood, and this is a form of killing tomorrow. We are murderers of our own future,” Mexican reporter and editor Javier Valdez Cárdenas said in 2011, as he received a press freedom award from the Committee to Project Journalists.
Guns legally and officially purchased frequently go missing and end up in the hands of criminals, or are used to commit official atrocities.
Valdez had founded the weekly newspaper Ríodoce in his hometown of Culiacán in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. He reported on narco culture and the intersection of poverty and crime in his column Malayerba, or “Bad Weed.” He also wrote several books, including one called The Kids of the Drug Trade.
And then on May 15, 2017, he was murdered by assailants on motorcycles while leaving his office.
Valdez’s words came to mind when I learned of a little girl in Uvalde who had dipped her fingers in her classmates’ blood and wiped it on herself so she could better pretend to be dead.
Like the Mexican youth Valdez described, this generation of Americans has grown up terrorized by the threat and experience of gun violence.
My son Cameron graduated from Tucson High last year, and “active shooter” drills were a routine part of his education. Cam also experienced the trauma of January 8, 2011, when 13 people were wounded and six killed, including a nine-year-old girl, at a constituent meet-and-greet for our local congressperson Gabby Giffords. Afterward, I took him and his little sister to a healing event for kids that had therapy dogs. He mostly remembers how upset I was.
The link between mass shootings here and cartel violence in Mexico and Central America is the easy availability of guns in the United States.
Around 200,000 weapons are smuggled south each year, and between 70% and 90% of firearms recovered from crime scenes are trafficked from the United States, according to the government of Mexico. Many of these “traffickers” are young people who are paid a pittance to smuggle guns, or increasingly, ammo. Until recently, almost no effort was made to stop them.
Murder rates were especially high in northern states adjoining Arizona and Texas, both being border states with lax gun regulations. The network is so large, a study from the University of San Diego revealed, that 50% of U.S. gun makers relied on weapons trafficked to Mexico to stay in business.
To counteract this, the Mexican government is now suing several U.S. gun manufacturers for billions in damages. The suit has been joined by some 13 U.S. states and dozens of other jurisdictions, gun control groups, legal organizations, and scholars, as well as international NGOs.
But like our own government, the Mexican government is complicit in the slaughter. Guns legally and officially purchased frequently go missing and end up in the hands of criminals, or are used to commit official atrocities.
A coalition of politicians including Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) have called for an end to the legal sale and transfer of guns to Mexico until the human rights situation improves. Some have also called for an end to arms sales to Central American countries steeped in gun violence, which they contend is fueling a lot of the migration we’re seeing.
We owe it to the victims of gun violence in Mexico and the United States — including the children of Uvalde and so many others who have given their lives — to stop this killing of tomorrow.
This column was edited by Progressive Perspectives, which is run by The Progressive magazine and distributed by Tribune News Service.