President Donald Trump’s State Department has officially designated some homicidal drug organizations, including Tren de Aragua and MS-13, as international criminal companies. Juan Pablo Spinetto, a columnist for the Bloomberg Opinion, called that choice “worrying” in an effort to refute the government’s action.
Always head the thousands of lives lost each year in Mexico and the United States as a result of drug gang violence. Pay no attention to the more than 250, 000 deaths in the United States as a result of fentanyl being smuggled into the country from Mexico across a largely opened Biden-era border since 2018. Given that the new Trump administration is upholding the campaign promises he made to the British people to protect them from for murder after four years of sad silence by an American president who was barely at the wheel. Spinetto has different issues.
While describing to readers why, in his resolve, President Trump’s move ahead to attribute Mexican narco-terrorist drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations may be “worrisome”, Spinetto takes an confused and false potshot at the constitutional and highly-regulated U. S. firearm industry.
” The idea of treating organizations as extremists… raises significant collateral challenges: Anyone who has contacts with cartels, whether intentionally or not, could be accused of working with extremists, from avocado manufacturers in Michoacán that pay to keep the US gun industry alive, which has been selling arms to crooks,” Spinetto writes. The assertion that U. S. firearm manufacturers” sell arms to criminals” is a flat-out lie.
The country’s one and only firearm retailer is in Mexico City, which is situated on a military base, and it is clear that Mexico does not have the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for its citizens. Arms that are legally exported from the United States to the Mexican military have undergone rigorous and thorough end-to-end security checks in an effort to prevent anyone else, especially the cartels, from having access to American-made weapons.
After all, there are documented reports of Mexican soldiers defecting to work for narco-terrorist drug cartels, bringing with them over 150, 000 firearms stolen from Mexican armories.  , Virtually all of the firearms used by the Mexican drug cartels, on the other hand, are illicitly possessed illegal arms unlawfully smuggled into Mexico by a network of drug cartels, through theft or straight-up government corruption. These facts are well known. Spinetto knows all of this too, of course, but the facts are inconvenient for his argument.
President Trump made a campaign pledge to stop the violence and crime coming from Mexico, whether it was drug trafficking or gang violence. Trump won by a landslide on Election Day, and he is carrying out those promises. He has more tools to put a stop to the violence by officially identifying Mexico’s drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
Where he had originally proposed the designation was made clear in President Trump’s Executive Order.
” The Mexican drug trafficking organizations have an intolerable alliance with the Mexican government.” The cartels have been given safe havens by the Mexican government for the production and transportation of dangerous narcotics, which collectively have resulted in the overdose deaths of hundreds of thousands of American victims. We must end the influence of these dangerous cartels, according to the White House Fact Sheet, because this alliance threatens the United States ‘ national security.
Mexico’s previous president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, did little to address his country’s violence, pursuing instead his “hugs, not bullets” approach that treated the cartels with kid gloves, a policy instituted after he reportedly took campaign contributions from drug cartels. He also oversaw the filing of a frivolous$ 10 billion lawsuit by the Mexican government, working in tandem with U. S. based gun control activists, to sue law-abiding U. S. firearm manufacturers.
President Claudia Sheinbaum doesn’t seem to be altering any ideas, and she is blatantly making fresh threats to President Trump and the U.S. firearms industry if he continues to fulfill his promises. Following Spinetto’s lead, she had the audacity to threaten to expand Mexico’s lawfare against U. S. firearm manufacturers to claim the industry was giving material aid to foreign terrorists. That’s rich coming from the government that provides” safe have n” to her country’s narco-terrorists.
The facts are clear. The U.S. firearms industry does not support Mexico’s narco-terrorist cartels and permit them to carry out heinous acts of violence against the Mexican people. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ( ATF ) is in charge of strict regulations for firearm manufacturers in the United States. Even during the Biden administration, with all the other attacks against the firearm industry, there was never a hint, nor allegation, of transnational arms smuggling by U. S. firearm manufacturers.
The lawsuit by Mexico against U. S. firearm manufacturers is a distraction, and I am confident it will be thrown out by the U. S. Supreme Court. Mexican manufacturers of illegal firearms are not accountable for criminal activity and violence in the United States. For those answers, Mexico must answer to their own government corruption by cartel influence.
President Sheinbaum would be wise to remember that discovery in civil litigation in America occurs in both directions, in the unlikely event that Mexico’s case isn’t dismissed. The safety and security of the American people is in the hands of President Trump. His strong actions in the fight against Mexican drug cartels demonstrate that he is taking responsibility seriously, and the American people back him.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for firearms, has a senior vice president and general counsel named Lawrence G. Keane.
