Gun violence and trafficking prevention advocates have found a dependable ally in Mexico, whose government has brought a second lawsuit against the U.S. firearms industry for negligent business practices, Courthouse News reports. That was the message put across by speakers at an international conference in Mexico City Thursday. Representatives from the Mexican government, the United Nations, academia and civil society groups convened at Colmex University for a two-day series of talks titled “The business of lethality: Arms trafficking to Mexico,” where they spoke about new strategies to stem the tide of guns flowing south across the U.S.-Mexico border. “The inside game — that is, working strictly within the United States to prevent gun violence — has not worked,” said Jonathan Lowy, founder of the newly established Global Action on Gun Violence (GAGV). “The outside game is something that might be more successful.”
The outside game involves combatting the firearms industry’s role in gun violence both inside the U.S. and abroad. Lowy, who worked as chief legal counsel for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence for 25 years before founding GAGV in September, highlighted Mexico’s leading role in this new front in the fight against gun violence. “Countries and people from outside of the U.S., with Mexico in the lead, can help international organizations to have the potential to pressure or force the U.S. and that industry to finally reduce gun violence,” said Lowy. Mexico’s leading role has come in the form of a pair of lawsuits over the last 15 months to hold U.S. gun manufacturers and distributors accountable for negligent business practices. The Mexican government filed the first of these suits against several gun manufacturers in August 2021, claiming that as many as ninety percent of the guns recovered at crime scenes in the country were trafficked from the U.S.