David Hogg has once again seized on a complex international crisis to recycle a familiar, misleading talking point about American gun laws and the Mexican drug cartels.
His latest claim, made on X as cartel violence in Mexico continues to escalate, attempts to pin the blame squarely on the United States and its constitutional protections for gun ownership. According to RedState, Hogg declared, You guys wanna take a wild guess at where 90% of the guns used by the cartel come from? Its America. Our weak gun laws are literally arming the cartels that perpetuate so much of the violence driving mass migration. The assertion fits neatly into a progressive narrative that treats the Second Amendment as the root of every problem, but it collapses under even modest scrutiny.
There is a fundamental flaw in Hoggs oft-repeated 90 percent statistic, and it is not a minor one. The figure does not refer to 90 percent of all firearms used by Mexican cartels, but rather to 90 percent of the relatively small subset of guns that Mexican authorities already suspected originated in the United States and therefore submitted to U.S. officials for serial-number tracing. In other words, 90 percent of the guns presumed to have come from the United States were confirmed to have come from the United States.
That is a far cry from claiming that nearly all cartel weapons are sourced from American gun stores or private owners. This distortion was exposed years ago; This was debunked way back in 2009. At that time, the correct figure for firearms seized in Mexico and actually traced back to the United States was roughly 17 percent, and similar proportions have been reported as recently as 2021.
Faced with these numbers, one is left with two possibilities about Hoggs rhetoric: either he is unaware of the facts, or he is deliberately misrepresenting them to advance a political agenda. Mr. Hogg is either monumentally ignorant or deliberately misstating the facts - or both. I'm inclined to embrace the power of and in this case. For a movement that claims to be driven by data and science, the persistence of such a debunked talking point suggests that narrative, not truth, is the priority.
There is also a glaring omission in Hoggs framing of the issue: the role of the U.S. federal government itself, particularly under Democratic leadership, in the flow of weapons south of the border. Young Mr. Hogg has apparently never heard of the Obama administration's Operation Fast and Furious, otherwise known as the ATF gunwalking scandal, wherein the Obama administration and Attorney General Eric Holder let thousands of American-made guns slide across the border, bound south, in one of the most incompetent cluster foul-ups that the United States government has ever attempted. That scandal, which saw federal agents effectively facilitate cartel access to U.S. firearms, undercuts the simplistic claim that the problem is weak gun laws rather than reckless government policy.
Moreover, the weaponry now in the hands of the cartels goes far beyond what any law-abiding American can purchase at a local gun shop. A video recorded from the Texas side of the border showed what was described as a firefight between Mexican authorities and cartel forces, and while the visuals were limited, the audio told the real story. The cartels were using at least two full-up, crew-served machine guns. Not AR-15s, not AK-pattern rifles, that people who don't know their fourth point of contact from a hole in the ground about guns describe as machine guns. No, these were real, no-kidding machine guns, the sort that you can't just buy at the local gun shop - these had to have come, one way or another, from the Mexican military or some other military source.
That reality points to corruption and failure within Mexican institutions and international arms channels, not to American citizens exercising their constitutional rights. Also, our recent reporting indicates that the cartels are also fielding grenade launchers and rocket launchers. Does Mr. Hogg presume those are somehow coming from the United States as well? The notion that U.S. retail gun laws are responsible for cartel access to military-grade hardware is not serious policy analysis; it is political theater.
Hoggs behavior fits a broader pattern on the left: elevate a pet cause, ignore inconvenient facts, and shoehorn that cause into every news cycle, regardless of relevance or accuracy. David Hogg is like so many on the left: He has a pet cause. He knows little or nothing about the object of his cause, but he speaks freely on this topic he knows very little about, and in every news piece, no matter what the topic, he manages to do a verbal lateral arabesque to make it about his pet cause and somehow manage to maneuver himself back into the spotlight. The difficulty for him is that, over time, this approach exposes a consistent pattern of error.
The problem he has is this: He's utterly reliable in that every time he opens his mouth, every time he vents his spleen on X, he says something dumb. This case is no exception. While cartel violence and mass migration are serious crises demanding sober, fact-based solutions, Hoggs rhetoric offers neither. Instead, it serves as another reminder of how gun-control activists routinely exploit tragedy and chaos to attack the rights of law-abiding Americans, even when the facts point elsewhere.
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