ATF's New Mandate

From the Times:

The Obama administration on Monday approved a new regulation requiring firearms dealers along the Southwest border to report multiple sales of certain semiautomatic rifles, a rule intended to make it harder for Mexican drug cartels to obtain and smuggle weapons from the United States.

Under the rule, dealers in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas will be required to inform the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives if someone buys — within a five-day period — more than one semiautomatic rifle that accepts a detachable magazine and uses ammunition greater than .22 caliber. Such weapons include AK-47s.

This is a nice symbolic move, I guess, but if you put yourself in the shoes of a gun ant for the Mexicans, it's really hard to see how this has much of an impact. Instead of amassing a half dozen AKs in a single day from a single store, you amass them from six stores in three days. Or they can do things exactly as they did before, but in Colorado and Nevada instead of Texas and Arizona. A bit less convenient, but otherwise? The gangs in Mexico were already being supplied in relatively small numbers, with assault rifles arriving in the twos and fours rather than by the dozen. This doesn't make that much harder. At best, it will make the flow of guns marginally slower.