Mexico remains wary of its gun-happy neighbor

MEXICO CITY - Juan Garcia relinquished his cellphone, walked through two metal detectors, registered with a uniformed soldier - and then finally entered Mexico's only legal gun store.

To anyone familiar with the 49,762 licensed gun dealers in the United States, or the 7,261 gun-selling pawnshops, the place looked less like a store than a government office. Customers waited on metal chairs to be called up to a window to submit piles of paperwork. The guns hung in drab display cases as if for decoration, with not a single salesclerk offering assistance.

The goal of the military-run shop seemed to be to discourage people from buying weapons, and even gun lovers like Mr. Garcia, 45, a regular at a shooting club, said that was how it should be.

"If you want to stop someone who gets mad at their wife or the world from running out and buying a gun and killing everyone, you have to make it hard," said Mr. Garcia, who waited two months for the approval to buy a .38-caliber pistol. "It's the only way to make people think."

Mexicans and Americans share many things - a love for pickup trucks, beef, national flags and family - but when it comes to guns, the two countries are feuding neighbors. Each has its own vastly different approach for controlling firearms, and while neither the restrictive gun laws in Mexico nor the more permissive model in the United States has stopped bullets from flying, people on both sides of the border always ask why the people next door are so terribly violent.

Americans look at Mexico and see a country of relentless bloodshed, where heads are rolled into discos, where mutilated bodies show up a dozen at a time and where more than 60,000 people have been killed since the government began its assault on drug traffickers in 2006.

Mexicans look with amazement at the ease with which guns can be bought in the United States and at the gory productions coming out of Hollywood, and they shake their heads at the mass shootings last year in Tucson, Arizona, and recently in Aurora, Colorado.

Why, Mexicans ask, don't Americans tighten their gun laws? Doing so, they say, would stanch the violence in the United States and in Mexico, where criminal groups wreak havoc with military-grade weapons smuggled in from the United States.

President Felipe Calderon has been hammering this message for years, with ever more zeal. In February, he unveiled a nearly three metric ton billboard in Ciudad Juarez - made from crushed, confiscated guns - with the message "no more weapons," written in English, and easily visible from the Texas side of the border.

He also used Twitter to respond to the Colorado massacre with a similar demand. "Because of the Aurora, Colo., tragedy, the American Congress must review its mistaken legislation on guns. It's doing damage to us all."

The United States-Mexico gun divide was not always so wide. Article 10 of Mexico's 1857 Constitution declared, much like the American Second Amendment, that "every man has the right to bear arms for his security and legitimate defense." But since then, the country has veered from the American model.

The 1917 Constitution written after Mexico's bloody revolution, for example, says that the right to carry arms excludes those weapons forbidden by law or reserved for use by the military, and it also states that "they may not carry arms within inhabited places without complying with police regulations."

The government added more specific limits after the uprisings in the 1960s, when students looted gun stores in Mexico City. So under current law, typical customers like Rafael Vargas, 43, a businessman from Morelos who said he was buying a pistol "to make sure I sleep better," must wait months for approval and keep his gun at home at all times.

The largest weapons in Mexico's single gun store - including semiautomatic rifles like the one used in the Colorado attack - can be bought only by members of the police or the military. Handgun permits for home protection allow only for the purchase of calibers no greater than .38.

Still, many Mexicans acknowledge that Mexican violence would not disappear even if American laws were more restrictive. "If the criminals didn't get their guns from the U.S., they would just get them from somewhere else," said Mr. Garcia, the gun club member.

Mexicans all over the country say this much is clear: Mass murders reflect and reproduce a culture of violence in which killing is glorified as a way to achieve fame, fortune or both.

Many people said that the only way to stop severe violence was to make sure that in Mexico and the United States, the costs of heinous crime outweigh the perceived benefits. "It's an issue of collective conscience," said Gildardo Olazaran, 31, Mr. Garcia's nephew. "Our best hope is to make it like tobacco - something that used to be cool."

The New York Times