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I called up Champe Barton from over at the Trace to talk about a totally new way to think about gun control. But honestly, I can’t shake the very first thing he told me—a fact that seems to explain just how hard it is to prevent gun violence in the first place: “If you want to buy a gun in Mexico, there’s one gun store, and it’s on an army base. There’s just one, in the entire country.”

I live in a country, the United States, where there are twice as many gun stores as there are post offices, so it kind of blows my mind that just across the border things work like this. To get a gun legally in Mexico? You go through months of background checks. You apply for a temporary permit. And then you go to that military base. When the L.A. Times visited a few years back, the store sold just 38 guns a day to civilians.

And all this is even more shocking when you consider the kind of news stories Americans are used to hearing about Mexico. Since 2010, more than 200,000 people have been killed by guns there. I asked Barton to explain that disconnect. “The biggest issue is just that there’s thousands of American guns that are crossing the border every year into Mexico,” he said. “It comes out to somewhere between 360,000 to 597,000 guns a year that come over the border.”

And Mexico is pissed—so pissed, in fact, that it’s taking American gunmakers to court. With this case, the Mexican government is arguing we should think about American gunmakers the same way we think about tobacco companies or opioid distributors—as an industry that really should know better. “This Mexico case was an example to me of a new, fresh attempt at getting at this problem,” Barton said.

On a recent episode of What Next, we discussed this case of the Mexican government vs. American guns. Can a lawsuit do what politicians haven’t? Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Mary Harris: For the last couple of years, the Mexican government has been moving forward with this lawsuit against U.S.-based gun manufacturers. Tell me who exactly Mexico is suing here?

Champe Barton: Mexico is suing seven gun manufacturers and one gun distributor. The seven gun manufacturers are manufacturers whose guns most frequently turn up at crime scenes in Mexico. These are some of the biggest gunmakers in America: Colt, Smith & Wesson, Glock, Beretta. Huge names. They’re suing these companies, basically alleging that they have aided and abetted gun-trafficking operations, knowingly, with the intent of profiting off of that market.

Do they have proof that these manufacturers are helping drive the flow of guns from the U.S. to Mexico?

We can’t say if they have proof yet. You don’t have to prove a case before you bring it. What they have proved to a judge is that their allegations are plausible. If you look at the data on gun violence in Mexico relative to gun production in the U.S., you can see a pretty clear relationship between gun homicides on Mexican soil and U.S. gun production. As gun production goes up in the U.S., gun homicides go up in Mexico, generally. The central point is that there is a clear relationship here between what goes on in the U.S. in terms of its gun market and what goes on in Mexico in terms of its gun violence problem.

How exactly does a gun move from a U.S.-based manufacturer across the border to Mexico?

The market is basically the exact same as it would be for a U.S. gun buyer, up until the point of that final transaction. So the manufacturer makes the weapon, they send it usually to a wholesaler. The wholesaler will sell it to a dealer. The dealer will then put it in their shop, and someone can come in and buy it. In the case of the guns that are trafficked, very often, what’s happening is that people are going into those stores. They’re buying the guns with the intent of trafficking them, or because they’ve been tapped by someone who is working with a gun-trafficking ring to buy the gun. And then once that gun is purchased, it’s then smuggled south of the border, any number of ways. The exact path that the guns take after they leave the store is unclear. What is clear is that a lot of these........

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