’60 Minutes’ helps Mexico blame US for gun violence but unwittingly make case against gun laws

After proving
unable to meaningfully help Kamala Harris avoid another failed presidential bid with its apparently deceptive edit of her October interview, CBS News’ “60 Minutes” moved on to narrative curation for another apparent lost cause: the Mexican government.

In an
episode that aired Sunday, “60 Minutes” advanced the Mexican government’s preferred line regarding its failure to clamp down on gang violence, smearing Americans as “the bad actors in this dynamic” — an allegation that the foreign nation has raised against U.S. gunmakers in a case that will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in February.

In the process of pinning Mexico’s ills on America’s Second Amendment, CBS News unwittingly helped make the argument that gun-control laws are ineffective in stopping violent crime.

While Article 10 of the
Mexican Constitution entitles Mexican citizens to own guns, citizens must jump through numerous hoops to legally acquire a firearm, and there is only one gun store in the country where they can buy one in person.

According to a 2023 Americas Society/Council of the Americas report, Mexican lawmakers greatly limited this constitutional right following civil unrest in the late 1960s, depriving citizens of the right to open or concealed carry in most cases; banning various gun types and calibers for personal use; and making gun ownership conditional on both a one-year permit from the secretariat of national defense and membership in a shooting club. To acquire a gun permit, applicants must be 18 or older with past military experience and evidence of the mental capacity to operate a weapon. Mexicans reportedly cannot legally own more than 10 firearms or purchase ammunition for calibers of weapons they do not own.

‘I’m not going to advocate for restricting my rights because another country wants to shift blame.’

Despite these laws, Mexican criminals packing heat have driven a six-year trend of over
30,000 murders annually, and there are an estimated 16.8 million guns in civilian possession.

A viral
segment from the Sunday episode of “60 Minutes” details the lengthy process involved in legally acquiring a firearm in Mexico.

“There’s only one gun store in Mexico in the middle of a heavily guarded military base in Mexico City,” says the narrator. “Before customers can enter, they have to show proof they’ve passed psychological tests, drug screenings, and extensive background checks. The store sells about a thousand guns a month, mostly shotguns, small-caliber rifles, and handguns.”

“What civilians can’t buy here are the weapons the cartel favors. Those are not legally sold anywhere in Mexico,” added the narrator.

While the apparent point of the episode was to blame Mexico’s gun violence on weapons imported from the U.S., critics noted that CBS News helped demonstrate that gun-control laws aren’t great at reducing violent crime.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah)
tweeted, “Mexico must be the safest, least-violent country in the world. Oh wait …”

One user on X,
citing the cities with the highest homicide rates in the world, responded, “This gun control policy is so successful only 9 of the top 10 most murderous cities are in Mexico.”

Sean Davis, CEO of the Federalist,
wrote, “Mexico is definitely known for having no murder problems, so obviously that policy is working great.”

“You can tell this method is working by looking at Mexico’s extremely low crime rate,”
said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ press secretary, Jeremy Redfern.

Blaze News’ Julio Rosas
noted that the point of the “60 Minutes” piece was “to blame the U.S. and our Second Amendment for Mexico’s violence. As much as I love Mexico, I’m not going to advocate for restricting my rights because another country wants to shift blame.”

The program leaned on claims from former Mexican President López Obrador and others to suggest that restricting American gun sales would be something of a panacea.

Jonathan Lowy, an American lawyer representing Mexico in its lawsuits against U.S. gunmakers,
told “60 Minutes” that “you need to stop it at its source. Because all those problems are driven by the supply of U.S. guns to the cartels.”

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