Stop Gun Smuggling to Mexico!

Hello Fellow Shoutout! Followers, Did you know that 2,000 American guns are smuggled across the border into Mexico every single day? Did you know that 50,000 people have died in the past 5 years due to gun violence in Mexico? Or that an estimated 70 percent of the weapons used in Mexico between 2009 and 2010 originated from the United States? You may be asking yourself why you should care, or why I’m posting this on Shoutout!, a feminist blog. Well, for starters we should all care that 50,000 people have died in Mexico as a result of gun smuggling from the U.S. While those killed in the violence are typically men, the women left behind are faced with even larger economic burdens and the responsibility of supporting their family without the help of her partner. Not to mention the fact that failed U.S. policy is directly contributing to the ongoing violence in Mexico. So what can you do to help? The Stop Gun Smuggling: 3 Things Obama CAN Do campaign along with the Latin America Working Group (where I intern) and the Washington Office on Latin America has put together a petition urging the Obama administration to do three simple tasks: 1)      Enforce the existing ban on the importation of military-style assault weapons (because many of them are later illegally smuggled into Mexico); 2)      Require gun dealers to report to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) the sale of multiple assault rifles to the same person over a period of five days 3)      Strengthen legal enforcement in regions of the U.S. that supply the bulk of the contraband weapons smuggled into Mexico. The petition creators are trying to get 50,000 signatures: one for each of the victims killed in the violence thus far.  We have 35,000 so far so we only need a few thousand more! Please, take just one minute and sign this petition if you care about our neighbors to the South! It’s a small action that will (hopefully) have a huge result: saving the lives of thousands of Mexican citizens.