Around 70 percent of the illegal firearms seized in Mexico are traced back to U.S. sales, according to the latest ATF data. The clandestine nature of arms trafficking makes it difficult to gauge the true scope of the trade, but Mexican authorities estimate about 2.5 million American guns have poured across the border over the past decade. Mexico saw upwards of 150,000 homicides linked to organized crime from 2006 to 2018, and the homicide rate has remained at historically high levels over the last two years.“It's the same appeal that makes Craigslist convenient when you want to sell a couch. This represents a pretty significant source of trafficked firearms.”
A collection of .50-caliber rifles seized from criminals on display at a military base in Mexico City on August 1, 2017. (Photo by Bernardo Montoya/AFP via Getty Images)
A recent listing by a private seller on Armslist for a M249 SAW rifle.
The allegation that gun buyers and sellers are turning to Armslist to avoid background checks is not new. In 2019, researchers at the University of Minnesota analyzed data from more than 4.9 million Armslist posts and found that less than 10 percent mentioned a background check. The advocacy group Everytown For Gun Safety looked at 9 million posts on Armslist from 2018 to 2020 and found that more than three-quarters of listings by unlicensed sellers did not require a background check.Sellers on the site contacted by reporters from digital news outlets the Verge and the Trace said they tended to trust their gut while negotiating sales and would sometimes check out the buyer’s online presence, but “only a handful” would actually take prospective customers to a licensed dealer for a proper background check. In response, a lawyer for Armslist issued a statement to the news sites that said the company “fully complies” with all laws and regularly assists law enforcement. “The gist of the opposition to Armslist lies in opposition to the private ownership of firearms,” the statement said.“A lot of people who want to traffick firearms, to obtain firearms without a record or sell to people who could not possess them legally, have turned to this unregulated private market.”
Excerpt from a criminal complaint filed last year in a federal court in Oklahoma against Jorge Luis Villarreal, Corey Jump, and Richard Pond. All three defendants eventually pleaded guilty.
There’s at least one other federal case aside from Villarreal’s where a seller on Armslist told investigators he was involved in shipping guns to Mexico. The defendant, a 23-year-old former U.S. Army soldier, eventually pleaded guilty to illegally importing or manufacturing firearms and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison.Pond pleaded guilty to the same charge as Villarreal and was sentenced last week to 48 months of probation. His lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. Pond agreed to surrender 114 pistols, rifles, and shotguns to federal authorities as part of his plea agreement. Jump, the other straw purchaser, pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators. He was sentenced in September to 24 months of probation. His attorney did not respond to requests for comment, but said in court documents that Jump is “a family man with strong values,” who’d never been arrested previously. Like Villarreal, he told the court that he’d fallen on hard times during the pandemic and was trying to make some extra cash by selling guns.Several of Jump’s friends and customers from his Porsche repair shop wrote letters to the court on his behalf, including a retired FBI agent and a former deputy for the sheriff’s office in Logan County, Oklahoma. The ex-deputy, Don Horton, told VICE News he doesn’t want guns winding up in the hands of criminals, but he also doesn’t view Armslist as being problematic because there are plenty of other ways to acquire weapons without undergoing a background check.“Armslist is just a small slice of the pie of the transfer of firearms between individuals,” Horton said. “It facilitates in making it easier perhaps, but it does not facilitate something that wouldn’t happen by some means anyway.”Villarreal pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to deal firearms without a license and got 37 months in federal prison, a sentence he began serving last week. He admitted to taking “approximately 59” guns into Mexico and illegally selling others in Oklahoma and Texas. He declined an interview request through his attorney. In a memo to his sentencing judge, Villarreal’s lawyer wrote that he “had no malice in his heart, he wasn’t trying to cheat vulnerable victims, and while he admittedly was trying to make a profit, he certainly wasn’t doing it out of greed.”CORRECTION Nov. 10, 2021, 10:43 a.m.: This story has been updated to include a response from the founder of Armslist and to clarify that a gun used to kill a Chicago police commander in 2018 was not purchased directly from a seller on Armslist. The gun was allegedly sold via Armslist, but it changed hands before it was used in the shooting.“You get people working for the cartel, or people working for a trafficking group, they’re looking for guns they want, they will travel throughout states just to get ’em.”