Laci sent me the link to this absolutely fascinating report.
There are two primary markets for illicit arms –
those who need weapons for criminal purposes, and
those who need them for political ones.
To get a sense of the relative value of the market for
firearms compared to other forms of contraband, it
helps to look at some concrete examples. On 16
November 2009, the Nicaraguan Government
made what was hailed as “one of the largest seizures
of weaponry ever made by the Nicaraguan authorities”
6 – a consignment of arms for the local representatives
of the Mexican Sinaloa cartel. The
shipment comprised 59 assault rifles, two grenade
launchers and 10 grenades, eight kilos of TNT and
nearly 20,000 rounds of ammunition. While this
sounds impressive, the total value of this shipment
was likely less than US$200,000 at point-of-sale.
Three days later, the Nicaraguan navy seized 2.4
tons of cocaine off the Caribbean coast. The value
of this shipment was at least 400 times as much,
around US$80 million in US wholesale markets.
One area where criminal weapons flows could conceivably
provide attractive long-term profits for
organized groups is the movement of weapons from
the USA to Mexico, one of the two trafficking flows
discussed further below. Due to a constitutional
provision that asserts that the right to bear arms
must be protected in a free state, the United States
has the most heavily armed civilian population in
the world, and so opportunities for diversion by
theft are plentiful. But, as will be discussed, it
appears that most of the guns trafficked into Mexico
are actually purchased legally and then transported
clandestinely across the border.
