Mexico City to Its Poor and Armed: ‘Trade Your Guns for Swag’ (Photos)

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Guns for Goods

A police officer holds a .45 pistol during a voluntary disarming program outside Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City.

Mexico’s staggering tally of gun violence—2009 and 2010 combined for more than 20,000 firearm homicides—is largely a result of the country’s extremely lethal supporting role in America’s war on drugs. As long as a grossly lucrative, illegal industry is a prime driver of a country’s economy, the conventional wisdom goes, murder rates can be expected to be obscenely high.

So far, politicians south of the border have had no success in persuading the U.S. to alter its killer drug policy; so officials in Mexico City have taken an alternate route to cutting down gun deaths within the municipality.

The city recently held a gun trade-back event for one of its most impoverished, violence-prone neighborhoods. Lured by the offer of cash, bicycles and computer tablets, residents flocked to a “voluntary disarming program” outside Basilica de Guadalupe and exchanged firearms for swag.

Click through to see scenes from a voluntary personal disarmament party.

Photo: Jorge Dan Lopez/Reuters

Disarmament on Wheels

A man prepares bicycles to give residents who swapped their weapons as part of a voluntary disarmament program, in Mexico City.

Gun buyback programs have been operating in the United States on a city-by-city basis for decades. Typically, police departments, churches or other civic organizations will offer cash, food cards or other incentives to residents who turn in functioning firearms. The exchange is made on a “no questions asked” basis, with an understanding that the guns will be destroyed or otherwise permanently removed from circulation by police.

Photo: Edgard Garrido/Reuters

Bulletproof Queue

A woman holds a rifle while waiting with others to hand in their weapons, as part of a voluntary disarmament program.

Critics of U.S. gun buyback programs insist that actual criminals are never among the residents who show up to remove another gun from the street. Statistics affirming the efficacy of gun buyback programs are difficult—make that impossible—to come by, although Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa claimed that a 2009 weapons trade event “took more guns off the streets of L.A. than there were shooting victims in the city last year.”

Photo: Edgard Garrido/Reuters

Lady’s Home Companion

A woman holds a pistol before handing it in to the police in Mexico City.

America’s interest in gun buyback programs spiked following the December 14, 2012, massacre of 20 children and six adults by a lone gunman at Newtown, Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School. The Sandy Hook shooting either inspired or moved up the date on already scheduled weapon buy-back events in Lansing, Michigan; Los Angeles, California; Seattle, Washington; and Bristol Township, Pennsylvania.

Photo: Bernardo Montoya/Reuters

Close, But No Bicycle

A police officer looks at a blow-gun normally used as a tool, handed in by a citizen in Mexico City.

Gun owners who voluntarily turn in their weapons can rest assured that no burglar will ever make off with the household shooter and use it with criminal intent. However, gun advocates worry that without law-abiding neighbors remaining armed, the community as a whole is less safe from criminal activity.

Photo: Bernardo Montoya/Reuters

Cat’s Got Your Gun

A rifle is seen while residents wait to hand in their weapons as part of a voluntary disarmament program in Mexico City.

A group of gun buyers reportedly attended a February 2011 gun buyback in Austin, Texas, and offered to purchase firearms from people who had arrived with the intention of turning their weapons over to local police. One eyewitness claimed the group was successful in buying trunks full of usable handguns and rifles, and that law-enforcement personnel were “unbelievably cooperative” in the process.

Photo: Edgard Garrido/Reuters

Pile of Death

Weapons collected as part of a voluntary disarmament program, are seen in Mexico City.

The glut of illegal guns in Mexico has been abetted by legal sales in the United States. Mexico has only one official gun store in the entire country, run by the military, and restrictions on firearms purchases include a months-long approval process, stipulation that guns must always be kept in the home, and no calibers greater than .38.

So where do all the guns used in all those gun deaths come from? Click through one more slide to uncover one embarrassing source of Mexico’s drug war weaponry.

Photo: Edgard Garrido/Reuters

And Where’s the Gun?

A police officer looks at ammunition handed in by a citizen in Mexico City.

From 2009 to 2011, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) lost track of 2,000 weapons that it had allowed to flow south of the border into drug cartel armories in the disastrous Fast and Furious sting operation. More than 1,700 of those weapons were assault rifles purchased from Arizona gun dealers. No criminals were stung, but two of the “lost” rifles were found near the body of a slain United States Border Patrol agent, Brian A. Terry.

Photo: Bernardo Montoya/Reuters

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