In May 2024, more than three years after I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request, the ATF released data on firearms recovered in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras and traced to purchases in the United States over an eight-year period. That new data shows 52,541 firearms recovered in Mexico between 2015 and 2022 were traced to a U.S. purchase. The new data reinforces the importance of Texas in the illicit gun pipeline: Of those, more than 40 percent came from Texas.

A previous leak of gun tracing data also shows that some specific Texas firearms dealers are the source of a large number of crime guns recovered in Mexico. According to data on guns traced from Mexico to the United States in 2019-2020, Primary Arms in Houston sold more than 40 carbine rifles (most of them were Anderson AM-15s) recovered from crime scenes in 2019-2020 alone.

More than half of firearms traced to Texas from Mexico came from a dozen cities: Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Fort Worth, Dallas, El Paso, McAllen, Laredo, Brownsville, Pharr, Corpus Christi, and Grande Prairie.

Licensed gun dealers in just six zip codes in Texas border towns were the source of nearly three thousand firearms trafficked to Mexico, recovered, and traced to a purchase. Gun dealers in McAllen were the source of more than a thousand crime guns recovered in Mexico from 2015 through 2022; most of the 18 gun dealers in this border town are pawn brokers, but there is also an Academy Sports—and Dynamic Tactical Solutions. Dynamic Tactical Solutions, on its website, states that the Second Amendment is “the only thing standing between freedom and tyranny” and that it seeks the “normalization of gun culture.”