Mexican Secretary of Foreign Relations Alicia Bárcena yesterday demanded an investigation into how American military weaponry is increasingly turning up in Mexico. According to reporting by the Associated Press, Bárcena said that Mexico's Defense Secretary warned U.S. officials about the widespread prevalence of military arms, including belt-fed machine guns and grenade launchers, in the hands of Mexican criminal groups. The Mexican Defense Secretariat reported confiscating 221 automatic machine guns, 56 grenade launchers and about a dozen rocket launchers from criminals from late 2018 until June 2023.
The simple answer to how military arms from the U.S. are winding up in the hands of drug cartels is that, just like at least 70% of weapons that wind up in Mexico, grenade launchers and belt-fed machine guns are sold commercially in the United States.
It wasn't always this way. In 2011 Ohio Ordnance Works, a weapons manufacturer in Chardon, Ohio, introduced the first production line belt-fed M240 machine gun in a semi-automatic configuration to the U.S. civilian market.
While U.S. laws prohibit the sale of automatic weapons to civilians without a special manufacturer's license or a lengthy application and rigorous background check process for registered machine guns produced before 1986, Ohio Ordnance Works engineered a workaround that allowed them to offer a weapon system nearly identical to the M240 machine gun fielded by U.S. soldiers and marines for sale to civilians. By redesigning a few internal parts to not be considered "designed […] or readily restored" into an automatic weapon by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), Ohio Ordnance Works overcame the only obstacle to selling an otherwise identical semi-automatic clone of the M240.
Not to be outdone, the American subsidiary of Belgian arms maker Fabrique Nationale Herstal created a new line of semi-automatic clones of the U.S. Army's M249 SAW for sale on the U.S. civilian market in late 2015.
Belt-fed machine guns for sale to civilians was a paradigm shift for the North American illicit market. Converting a semi-automatic belt-fed FN M249S to an automatic weapon is as simple as swapping out the fire control group and the operating rod assembly, no machining or drilling required. Conversion kits are sold commercially in the U.S. to certain federal firearms license-holders as well as on the black market.
It wasn't long before belt-fed machine guns functionally identical to the weapons used by the U.S. military started turning up by the hundreds in self-published cartel propaganda and seizures by the Mexican security forces.
Ohio Ordnance Works is owned by Robert W. Landies III, a former Marine and participant in the Capitol insurrection.
In January 2019, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) awarded Ohio Ordnance Works a $26,141,125 firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for receiver cartridges with a performance completion date in February 2024.
Despite Ohio Ordnance Works' status under DOD contract, the company made an illegal six-figure donation to the conservative Club for Growth Action Super PAC in February 2023, for which they received a fine from the Federal Elections Commission five months later.
An arms maker sympathetic to conservative politics is not unusual, but a DOD contractor whose owner participated in the Capitol riot producing what are essentially 80% machine guns flooding Mexico and ending up in the hands of the same violent criminal groups that Trump and other Republicans have expressed their intention to declare war on is extremely sus.
