State Level Bans on Assault Weapons and Firearms Trafficking to Mexico, 2015–2024

Firearms trafficking across the U.S.-Mexico border is a major challenge. While studies have examined the effect of U.S. federal policies on firearms trafficking and mortality in Mexico, limited studies have examined the effect of state-level policies. We examine a recently released dataset on the origin of firearms recovered from crimes committed in Mexico from 2015 to 2024 and traced by Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives. These traces included the U.S. state where firearms were last purchased at a retail store. We describe this dataset and explore the association between U.S. state levels bans on assault weapons and the volume of firearms recovered in Mexico from January 2015 to July 2014. We ran analyzes based on three categories of time to crime (TTC; <1 year, 1 to 3 years, >3 years) and controlled for other firearm-related policies, whether states border Mexico, gun ownership, and the monetary value of exports to Mexico. Our results indicate that states that ban assault weapons are less likely to have firearms recovered in Mexico traced back to a retail seller. This magnitude is larger when examining shorter periods of TTC. Overall, our study highlights the importance of including the impact of firearm-related policies not just in studies of firearm-related violence within the United States but also beyond its borders, particularly to Central American and Caribbean countries.