“60 Minutes” has done it again. In a special meant to attack the United States and positively frame Mexico’s gun control laws, it ended up producing one of the best pieces of pro-gun promotion in media history.
The CBS News program has long been the target of mockery for its comical left-wing bias. Who can forget Lesley Stahl’s infamous 2020 battle with incoming President Donald Trump in which she insisted the Hunter Biden laptop couldn’t be verified? Or when “60 Minutes” made up a story out of whole cloth about grocery chain Publix supposedly paying off Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis? More recently, the program got caught red-handed for not disclosing that a “misinformation” expert they were touting to attack the social media site X had actually worked for the Biden administration.
Oh, I almost forgot, “60 Minutes” also got into hot water just before the 2024 election by deceptively editing an interview with Kamala Harris to make her look better. That included cutting and pasting an answer to one question and putting it after another question that the vice president had completely flubbed.
So yeah, “60 Minutes” has had some issues, but that hasn’t stopped them from pursuing their ideological wants. Enter this story on guns and Mexico.
REPORTER: Like the US, Mexico’s constitution grants citizens the right to bear arms, but unlike the US, that right comes with a long list of restrictions. There’s only one gun store in Mexico, in the middle of a heavily guarded military base in Mexico City. But before customers can enter, they have to show proof they’ve passed psychological tests, drug screens, and extensive background checks. The store sells around a thousand guns a month. Mostly shotguns, small-caliber rifles, and handguns.
What civilians can’t buy here are the weapons the cartel favors. Those are not legally sold anywhere in Mexico.
Well, how’s that working out for them? Mexico is currently one of the most corrupt countries in the Western Hemisphere, with politicians controlled by the drug cartels. So how exactly has disarming normal citizens shown itself to be the best option? Because I’m pretty sure leaving everyone defenseless while heavily armed cartels run the show hasn’t helped the situation.
Just how restrictive are Mexico’s gun control laws? While the reporter notes about 1,000 guns a month are sold legally in the country, around 1.3 million are sold a month in the United States. That’s an astronomically higher figure, yet the homicide rate in Mexico is over fours times that of the United States.
“60 Minutes” doesn’t care about those numbers, though, because the point of their report is to blame the United States for the flow of guns into Mexico. As their narrative goes, because Mexico has such strict gun laws, it must be America’s fault that the cartels have fully automatic rifles and machine guns. Of course, those two things are largely outlawed within the United States as well, with only heavily vetted individuals allowed to own them. That’s really beside the point, though.
Anyone who believes the cartels would somehow be less violent if America had stricter gun laws is an imbecile. The motivations of the drug trade dictate that they will find a way to murder people. If that means sourcing surplus Russian weaponry from South America, they’ll do it (and they are doing that). The idea that a normal American being able to buy an AR-15 is somehow responsible for deaths in Mexico is moronic. It’s the logic of a child who can’t process nuance.
At the end of the day, nothing is gained by restricting law-abiding citizens from owning firearms. Criminals do not follow gun laws. They don’t kill simply because they have access to certain types of weapons. If it wasn’t an “assault rifle,” it’d be a sawed-off shotgun or a car bomb. The root of the violence in Mexico is not the importation of American-made firearms, however many guns that may add up to. It’s the corruption and fecklessness of the government that has allowed the cartels to flourish.
Until that changes, Mexicans and the rest of the world will continue to suffer. If “60 Minutes” weren’t such a joke of a news program, they’d have focused on that instead of trying to blame normal Americans for something they have no part in.
