To some shoppers, the irony is clear: Mexico has some of the toughest gun-control laws in the world, yet the country's drug cartels are armed to the teeth with illegal weapons that are smuggled over the border from the United States.
"If the United States had a system like ours, we wouldn't have so many problems here in Mexico," Agustin Villordo, 27, of Puebla said as he shopped for a hunting rifle.
On Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano visit Mexico to discuss ways to stop the smuggling of American weapons, which Mexico says account for 90% of confiscated arms here. The meeting is part of an urgent American effort to aid Mexico as it fights a bloody war against drug cartels.
More than 6,300 people have died in drug-related violence since 2006, and some crime has spilled into the USA.
Mexican President Felipe Calderón says little will change as long as the United States continues to make gun purchases so easy. His government is pressuring the Obama administration to tighten rules on sales, rather than just the cross-border transport of weapons.
"It is necessary to reduce the sale of weapons, particularly of high-powered weapons, in the United States," Calderón said Monday.
"I would dare say that Mexico has some of the strictest regulations about gun ownership in all the world, and we're right next to a country ... that has some of the easiest ones"
Yea nice example there oldtimer, a nation over run with psychopathic drug lords who enjoy cutting up 30 bodies per time and dumping them in the middle of a busy road, empowered in there madness by the good old USA. Land of the brave home of the timid, hey someone might pop a cap in your ass if you speak out of line.
