Why Grand Prairie guns keep turning up at crime scenes in Mexico

Guns purchased from a single ZIP code in Grand Prairie, Texas, have been popping up in Mexico in significant numbers over the past several years.

From 2015-2022, the 75051 ZIP code was the source of more confiscated guns – roughly three dozen per year – in Mexico than from any other Texas ZIP code not located on the border.

Furthermore, a recent federal firearms report shows Texas is the nation’s leading supplier of illicit guns to Mexico’s drug cartels and other criminal organizations, representing 43% of the total.

Those are among the revelatory findings culled from a federal gun tracing database obtained by a nonprofit organization and analyzed recently by The Dallas Morning News.

At first glance, the data might suggest Grand Prairie is a hub for international arms trafficking. Dig a little deeper, however, and a more nuanced story emerges – one that not only reveals the challenges of firearms tracing as a tool against gun traffickers, but also illuminates the ongoing national debate between gun rights groups and gun safety advocates over whether such data should be made public.

Tracing can be helpful to agents, revealing patterns used by criminals and identifying possible suspects. And it can be used to alert gun sellers. But the data also can be of limited value when a gun’s serial number is filed off, when the sales paperwork is missing or when the firearms are old.

Those guns from Grand Prairie are a prime example.

The 275 Grand Prairie confiscated guns, it turns out, are very old. Some were bought so long ago that the North Texas gun store owners who sold them are long dead.

Case in point: Some guns from that ZIP code trace back to Bobby Ray Langford, according to a second set of tracing data from Mexico shared with researchers. Langford was a licensed gun dealer at Traders Village before he went out of business in 1990 after being charged in a gun running scheme. Agents said he sold 500 guns that later ended up in Mexico. Langford died in 2008, several years after police said Traders Village, a popular Grand Prairie flea market, stopped gun sales.

Still, those Grand Prairie guns likely circulated for years on the second-hand market before they were confiscated in Mexico and run through a tracing database maintained by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“Historically (up until 2002), there were a large number of gun vendors legally selling firearms at Traders Village,” Grand Prairie police spokesman Mark Beseda said in an emailed statement. “While we cannot conclusively trace the origin of the guns recovered in Mexico, I suspect that was the source.”

The ATF gun-tracing database lists only where the guns were originally sold by ZIP code (and, thus, also by city and state). But it does not list who sold the guns, leaving Grand Prairie police to guess.

But the separate tracing data from Mexican government computers, leaked by hackers, gives that theory credence. That data, which The News also analyzed, not only traces guns to Langford, but also notes that six other Grand Prairie guns recovered in Mexico in 2018 and 2019 were bought at Guns N Such, another licensed dealer that went out of business, in 1996. Guns N Such also operated at the Traders Village flea market.

It’s easy to see from the Grand Prairie gun revelations — which largely came to light from the separate data leaked by Mexican hackers — why ATF has been caught in the middle of a fierce ongoing debate about whether or not to release more gun tracing information. Gun safety advocates have criticized the agency for not providing more information and transparency. At the same time, many in the gun industry want the agency to restrict such data to law enforcement.

That debate largely pits public safety against privacy concerns, especially from licensed gun sellers, including large retailers such as Katy-based Academy Sports + Outdoors, that show up on ATF lists as having sold multiple guns used in crimes. This makes them a potential target of gun safety groups, despite not having been accused of doing anything illegal.

The disagreements on how ATF should manage its gun data is heating up as mass shootings continue to rise, along with pressure for the U.S. to stop the illicit flow of rifles and handguns to Mexico that arm the drug cartels.

Gun ownership laws in Mexico, which has a single gun store, are much stricter than in the U.S. and require a license and stringent background check.

Among Texas metro areas, Houston has consistently led the state in the number of crime guns recovered in Mexico, according to an analysis of ATF data. But the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area nearly caught up to it in 2019 and 2020, the data show.

North Texas guns not only help Mexican drug cartels maintain their drug trafficking empires, they are sometimes also used in attacks that injure and kill Americans. That happened in 2011 in Mexico when a North Texas gun was used in an attack that killed one U.S. agent, Jaime Zapata, and wounded a second.

The true extent of the carnage, though, is unknown. Most U.S. guns found in Mexico are never submitted for tracing, authorities say.

A 2009 Government Accountability Office report estimated that fewer than a quarter of guns recovered there were provided to ATF for tracing. And ATF reported last year that 73% of guns found in Mexico and other foreign countries cannot be traced to an initial buyer for various reasons. They include incomplete or invalid firearm information submitted by police; removed serial numbers and other markings; and missing or incomplete gun store sales records.

Another problem hindering gun tracing is the accuracy of the information submitted. ATF says Mexican authorities don’t always timely or accurately enter firearm makes, models and serial numbers into the tracing system.

Sara Abel, spokeswoman for the Dallas ATF office, said some of the Grand Prairie guns could have been sitting in an evidence vault in Mexico for years before being entered recently into the agency’s tracing database, known as eTrace.

ATF statistics indicate Mexico is submitting more guns for tracing every year. In 2022, almost 12,000 American guns recovered in Mexico were submitted to ATF for tracing – a 45% increase over 2017.

The eTrace system helps investigators quickly learn the origin and purchaser of crime guns, providing them with strong investigative leads. Tracing helps ATF identify “trafficking corridors, patterns, schemes, traffickers, accomplices, and straw purchasers,” according to a 2010 Justice Department report.

“It leads us to that first purchaser,” Abel said.

But Peter J. Forcelli, a retired ATF deputy assistant director, told The News that tracing is generally only useful in trafficking cases if the guns are recovered within two years of their initial retail purchase.

“Anything less than two years is something that would be suspicious,” said Forcelli, who worked as a Phoenix ATF supervisor.

Tracing allows ATF to determine the “time-to-crime,” or the time between the gun’s initial retail purchase and its recovery in a crime. The shorter this period is, the more likely the gun was bought for criminal purposes, officials say. The bureau considers a gun recovery within three years to be indicative of trafficking.

A 2010 Justice Department report said the Northern District of Texas that includes Dallas typically did not accept ATF gun trafficking cases if the recovery occurred more than a year after the retail sale.

When too much time elapses, Abel said, memories fade, people move, and records are lost or damaged.

Only about 13% of guns involved in international traces from 2017 to 2021 were recovered less than one year after the last known purchase, ATF says. And about a quarter were recovered less than three years.

The median length of time from sale to recovery in international gun traces was 6.5 years, ATF said. It’s shorter for crime guns recovered in the U.S.

Sometimes, though, agents get lucky. Such was the case with a 2023 Lewisville gun store purchase in North Texas.

Jose Enrique Zapata Jr. bought a Glock from the store, court records show, and a little more than two months later, police confiscated the pistol in a Central Mexico city. Authorities quickly traced it to Zapata. Earlier this year, the 25-year-old Dallas man admitted his involvement in a gun smuggling scheme, court records show.

Zapata pleaded guilty earlier this year to being a straw buyer – or lying on a firearms purchase form; a crime known as “lying and buying.” Buyers, who are paid marginal fees for the transactions, tend to be U.S. citizens who can pass a background check.

Zapata is serving two years in federal prison for buying about two-dozen guns that he understood were bound for Mexico, court records show. His attorney could not be reached by email for comment.

Slow and inefficient

Because gun tracing more typically can be slow and cumbersome, investigators use markings like serial numbers to trace recovered guns to the manufacturers, which leads them to the licensed dealers, who provide the identities of the first retail purchasers.

If the initial buyers later resold the guns, agents have to research the chain of ownership to try to find the last known purchaser. They will make phone calls, search paper records and knock on doors.

When U.S. dealers go out of business, ATF employees have to dig through boxes of their paper records or sift through digital scans of the records to run traces.

Defunct dealers are required to send their records to ATF’s National Tracing Center in West Virginia to be stored in warehouses for future trace requests. The center receives an average of 7 million firearms sales records per month, ATF says. Those records, however, cannot be easily searched because the government cannot by law maintain a database.

The Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of 1986, signed into law by former President Ronald Reagan, prohibited the government from creating a database of firearms dealer records. The NRA and other gun rights groups lobbied for the legislation to prevent a “gun registry,” saying it was needed to stop federal agencies from harassing law-abiding gun owners and dealers.

Stopping guns from crossing into Mexico is the best way to curb border violence and weaken the Mexican drug cartels, experts say. However, gun tracing happens after crimes have already been committed and rarely lead to arrests, studies show, particularly when it takes years for Mexican police to seize them.

“Tracing is like responding to a murder scene,” Forcelli said. “The murder happened.”

Still, tracing can at least sometimes lead to punishment.

A horrific gun battle in Mexico illustrates this point.

A woman bought an AK-47 type rifle with cash from a gun store north of Houston in November 2014, court records show. About six months later, in May 2015, the rifle was found at the scene of a gun fight between Mexican Federal Police and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, court records said. An astounding 43 people were killed.

The gun store has since gone out of business, and the buyer was sentenced in 2016 to two years in prison for a straw buying offense, according to court records.

Another gun found at the site of that same gun battle was purchased with cash about two months earlier – in March 2015 – from a Houston gun shop by a man who was sentenced to 46 months in prison for straw buying.

Forcelli said one of ATF’s best weapons against domestic and international arms trafficking is licensed firearms dealers and informants who tip them off to suspicious gun-buying activity. Red flags typically include making repeated cash purchases of guns known to be popular with the cartels.

Forcelli said 95% of his trafficking cases in Phoenix came from gun store tips.

Dallas ATF was tipped off, for example, about a suspected straw purchaser. An ATF agent said he received a call from a licensed dealer about Daniel Barbosa Chaparro’s “suspicious activity” at a gun store. Chaparro was taking photos of guns inside the unidentified store and buying them with cash, court records show. He drove a vehicle with Mexico license plates, records show, and used a paper license obtained just the day before.

Authorities arrested Chaparro in 2022 as he tried to cross the border with two assault rifles in his vehicle that he bought earlier that day, records said. Agents said his cell phone contained evidence that others were telling him what to do. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced in January to probation. His attorney declined to comment.

Gun control advocates such as John Lindsay-Poland, however, say helpful gun store employees can only do so much because straw buyers are not always easy to spot. Most guns intended for the Mexican cartels, he said, are bought in the U.S. one at a time.

Lindsay-Poland, a California journalist and researcher who runs a nonprofit called Stop US Arms to Mexico, believes the U.S. needs tighter gun regulations to stop the flow of guns across the border.

“There needs to be better regulation upstream of the market,” he said.

His organization was the one that received the ATF tracing data through a Freedom of Information Act request following a legal dispute over whether the records should be released.

Lindsay-Poland said many Texas gun stores are unknowingly selling .50-caliber rifles and AR-15s to Mexican drug cartel traffickers. The sales volume is so high, a certain percentage of the rifles will end up in Mexico, he said. Even if it’s only 1%, it’s significant, he added.

“It doesn’t take that many .50 calibers to create a big problem,” he said.

Both U.S. and Mexican leaders say stopping the Iron Pipeline – or the Iron River – is a top priority. ATF and the Department of Homeland Security said last year they seized more “southbound” guns in 2023 than in the previous year. And in Laredo, homeland security agents seized more than twice as many guns, according to the agency.

Lindsay-Poland believes an assault weapons ban is the single most important thing the U.S. can do to stop gun violence in Mexico.

Assault weapons, he said, are the “bread and butter of the criminal organizations. They’re buying them all the time.”

Republicans in Congress and the gun industry, however, strongly oppose such a measure, saying a ban would infringe on citizens’ Second Amendment rights.

Tracing data

The ATF tracing data include aggregate totals of guns recovered in Mexico and traced to U.S. retail sales by ZIP code from 2015 to 2022. It does not include sales dates or the names of gun stores. Lindsay-Poland’s organization made the data publicly available in a June online report called “The Iron River of Weapons to Mexico.”

Lindsay-Poland called it “finely grained data, never before disclosed, on the origins of guns trafficked and exported” to Mexico and Central America from the U.S. since 2015.

That data shows six ZIP codes in five Texas border cities – El Paso, McAllen, Brownsville, Laredo and Pharr – were the source of the most guns trafficked from Texas to Mexico. And three Texas cities were in the top five in the nation for Mexico gun traces, according to his report. Houston was first, followed by El Paso in fourth position and San Antonio in fifth.

Lindsay-Poland also acquired the hacked gun tracing data from Mexico.

The data covers 2018 to 2020. It originated from Mexico’s attorney general’s office, called Fiscalía General de la República or FGR, he said. It was hacked in 2022 from Mexican government servers by anonymous activists and shared with researchers and journalists, including Lindsay-Poland. It includes the names of U.S. gun stores that sold the weapons. And it helps to confirm the approximate age of the Grand Prairie guns recovered in Mexico based on their sale at Traders Village.

Lindsay-Poland said his organization received the ATF data after a three-year legal battle due to the Tiahrt Amendments, a series of laws beginning in 2003 that prohibit ATF from releasing tracing information to anyone outside of law enforcement.

Gun stores lobbied for the laws in part because trial lawyers were using tracing information to file lawsuits against them.

But tracing information is only as good as the front-end information entered about the recovered guns by Mexican officials. And that data is sometimes out of date and inaccurate. While some Mexican police agencies struggle with backlogs in their evidence vaults, others are less than enthusiastic about participating in the voluntary U.S. gun tracing program, experts say.

Forcelli said that when he was assigned to the Phoenix ATF office between 2007 and 2012, Mexican authorities weren’t tracing any guns. ATF would have to send agents down there to catch up on the backlog, he said. Recovered guns were piling up in Mexican evidence storage vaults, untraced, Forcelli said.

“Which was a problem for us.” he said, “because we didn’t know where they were coming from.”

The Mexican government announced in July 2023 that it reached an agreement with the U.S. to increase firearms tracing. An official said during the Mexico City news conference that about 200,000 weapons enter his country illegally each year.

As talks continue, Mexican authorities said they want the U.S. to revoke the licenses of gun stores that sell weapons to the drug cartels. No agreement has been reached on that proposal.

Forcelli said guns from an ATF scandal known as Fast and Furious are still turning up in Mexico. From 2009 to 2010, Arizona agents allowed suspects to buy and smuggle about 2,000 guns into Mexico in the hopes of tracking them to high-ranking bosses. That didn’t happen and the guns continue to be used in crimes on both sides of the border.

One of the guns was found at the site of where U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed in 2010 in Arizona.

“Long after I’m dead,” Forcelli lamented, “Fast and Furious guns are still going to be turning up in parts of Mexico.”

Data journalist Kai Teoh contributed to this report.