One Market, Many Guns: Illicit and Trafficked Firearms
in the United States and Mexico, 2021–2026
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Firearm violence is one of the most pressing public health and public safety problems in the United States and in the hemisphere. About two-thirds of crime guns recovered in Mexico and submitted for tracing came from the United States, and most traces of U.S.-sourced firearms outside the United States were recovered in Mexico. Because the gun markets in the United States and Mexico are so intertwined and impact people in both countries so profoundly, it is crucial to examine them together.
Between January 2021 and May 2026, 2,216,052 firearms recovered in the United States and Mexico were traced to their purchase from a U.S. gun dealer, according to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). For 2,214,914 of them, the data identify the zip code of the dealer that sold the gun. Through public records litigation and subsequent records requests, Stop US Arms to Mexico for the first time obtained crime gun tracing data broken down by the zip code of purchase, the state where guns were recovered, year of recovery, and time between the gun’s purchase and when it was recovered (known as “time-to-crime,” or TTC). The data show that gun trafficking is not a diffuse national or international problem. It is rooted in specific places.
Mexico is the fastest-growing of the report’s four destination categories for trafficked firearms (within state, bordering states, non-bordering states, and Mexico). The number of guns recovered in Mexico and traced to a U.S. sale rose 85 percent from 2021 to 2025, and Mexico was the only one of these destination categories where traces rose in every interval of time-to-crime.
Guns purchased in a small number of zip codes have the biggest impact. Just 456 zip codes, about 1.1 percent of zip codes in the United States, rank in the top 20 percent of sources in all four recovery categories. They account for 44 percent of guns recovered in Mexico and about one in four traced firearms overall. A smaller number of 120 zip codes supply more than a quarter of all Mexico gun traces, about one in eight guns recovered in bordering states, and nearly one in ten of all firearms traced in this period. But trafficking is also widespread: 10,316 zip codes were the source of at least ten crime guns recovered in Mexico or the United States.
Texas and Arizona supply two-thirds of Mexico gun traces. Between 2021–2022 and 2024–2025, Mexico traces originating in Maricopa County, Arizona, more than tripled, accounting for 41 percent of the increase. Several of the same Phoenix-area zip codes, in Phoenix and Glendale, also rank among Arizona’s leading sources of in-state and California-bound traces. This is one retail market feeding several destinations, not separate pipelines.
Most crime guns are recovered close to where they were sold. Of firearms recovered in the U.S. or Mexico and traced to a purchase, 1,581,227 (71.4 percent) were recovered in the same state where they were bought, and their leading sources are suburban zip codes on the edges of metro areas such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago and Cleveland. Another 249,017 firearms were recovered in a neighboring state, 331,201 in a non-neighboring state, and 52,480 in Mexico.
Guns that cross state lines follow several prominent corridors. The largest move from Arizona and Nevada into California, from Indiana and Missouri into Illinois, from Horn Lake, Mississippi, into Tennessee, and from Virginia into Maryland and Washington, D.C. The ten largest neighboring-state flows account for 36 percent of all bordering-state traces, and some run almost entirely one way: Arizona sent about 20 guns to California for every one that traveled in the opposite direction. Farther afield, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Florida feed the “Iron Pipeline” north to New York and the Mid-Atlantic in large but dispersed volumes.
Inside Mexico, Arizona and Texas feed two distinct corridors. Since 2024, more than three in five Arizona guns have been recovered in Sonora and Sinaloa, the state where cartel violence is now most acute. Arizona also supplies 65 percent of traced guns recovered in Chiapas, about 1,800 miles by road from its border, and most of those had been bought within the previous three years. Texas guns spread more widely across northern and central Mexico, led by Nuevo León, Chihuahua and Tamaulipas.
Much of the cartels’ firepower comes from the most powerful weapons sold legally in the United States but not in Mexico: AK-47s, AR-15s, and .50-caliber Barrett rifles. Of 4,027 short time-to-crime guns recovered in Mexico since the beginning of 2024, more than half (2,184) were 7.62-caliber firearms, which are typically AK-47-type rifles. Century Arms International, based in Florida and Vermont, now dominates the illegal gun market in Mexico. More than a third of the short time-to-crime weapons (1,484) were produced by Century Arms. Nearly all of these quickly trafficked Century weapons (92 percent) were purchased in Arizona. Fifty-caliber rifles also continue to be trafficked into Mexico, principally Barrett rifles. In all, 213 Barretts recovered in Mexico were traced to U.S. purchases since 2024, more than the number recovered and traced in the United States during the same period. While Arizona purchases accounted for 55 percent of the Mexico short time-to-crime Barrett traces, more than a quarter of the trafficked Barretts originated from non-border states.
State gun laws correlate strongly with the patterns of crime gun flows. States with the most permissive laws have about six times as many recently purchased crime guns per resident as states with the strictest laws. Most of the ten largest neighboring-state flows run from a more permissive state into a stricter one. This is a descriptive pattern, not proof of cause, but it holds for each of the three laws examined (background checks, assault weapons bans, and waiting periods) and matches two decades of research.
Firearms sales that flow into trafficking are concentrated enough to target through regulation, enforcement and social norms. The same suburban retail markets appear again and again, across time-to-crime bands and destinations: metro Atlanta, Glendale and Phoenix, Lake County, Indiana, North Las Vegas, and the Mississippi suburbs of Memphis. All of them host dealers that ATF itself flagged for supplying guns recovered in crimes soon after sale.
More than half of the traced guns were sold at least three years before they were recovered, and that number is growing. Guns diverted now will keep turning up at crime scenes, in the United States and in Mexico, long after they are sold. Today’s choices will have effects that last for years.
We urge the U.S. federal government to take action: to provide funding and authority to the ATF to inspect dealers, incentivize investigations, resume the program notifying dealers of trafficked guns, and other measures; and to enact legislation to ban assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and .50-caliber rifles and to universally require background checks to purchase a firearm.
We also call on state governments to take similar measures to stem the sale and purchase of guns used for violence. And we urge communities, the gun violence prevention movement, researchers and journalists to make use of this data and analysis, and to treat the market of guns used in violence in both the United States and Mexico as one problem affecting all of us.
