Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard denounced this Thursday a “manifest negligence” of United States arms manufacturers, against whom Mexico maintains a lawsuit in US courts, after the killing of 19 children and two teachers in a Texas school.
“There is manifest negligence on the part of this industry and we are not going to take our finger off the line, we are going to move on,” said Ebrard alluding to the lawsuit in which Mexico accuses eight US arms producers of a careless trade, which facilitates their illegal trafficking to Mexican drug cartels.
The massacre at the elementary school in the small town of Uvalde, Texas, an hour from the border with Mexico, was perpetrated by an 18-year-old teenager who bought a rifle legally.
“For a young man to be sold an assault weapon at 18, what it leads to is this kind of tragedy, It’s a huge tragedy,” he added. Ebrard, who said he was “deeply saddened” by the attack.
The Mexican foreign minister stressed that the Mexican plea, presented in August of last year before a federal court in the city of Boston, speaks “essentially” of the negligence of the arms-producing companies.
“For example, the company that produces this weapon, the [fusil de asalto] AR15, he advertises his weapons with very young people as you can see on their website,” Ebrard added during a press conference.
The AR-15 rifle – manufactured by Colt, one of the companies included in the Mexican lawsuit – is designed to cause the greatest possible number of victims in record time, according to industry data.
The Uvalde tragedy, the worst in a US school in a decade, multiplies anger and questions about how to limit the sale of weapons in that country, a control that could have prevented the massacre.
