Hi, everybody. It's Cheryl Ackison. Welcome to another edition of Full Measure After Hours.

Today, our investigation refutes the longstanding narrative that illegally sold U.S. guns are

responsible for Mexico cartel violence. For years, the narrative has been pretty clear and

pretty steady. It's that lax U.S. gun laws and American gun shops are supposedly flooding Mexico

with illegal weapons, arming cartels, and fueling the violence south of the border.

That narrative is a key point that has long prompted advocates to push for stricter gun control.

And Mexican officials too have pointed fingers north to here in America.

But today we expose some hard facts about Mexico gun violence that I think a lot of

people are going to find startling, although the data has been there in black and white for more than a

decade. In the episode of my TV show Full Measure Sunday, October 26th, John Dodson, a retired

senior special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms,

flips this whole narrative on its head.

Dodson spent nearly 15 years tackling firearms trafficking along the southwest border and

learned a lot.

He reveals that it is the U.S. and Mexican governments who are major sources of guns that end up in criminal hands,

not guns being illegally sold and trafficked.

The U.S. government is unwittingly a large supplier of weapons to Mexico's killer cartels through a legal route.

At least it starts out legal. The U.S.

government legally sells these guns to Mexico, and then once they reach Mexican government hands,

the guns are diverted to violent cartels. You may recognize John Dotson's name because he's the one

who blew the whistle on the government's ill-fated,

fast and furious debacle in an interview he did with me for CBS News back in 2011.

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