Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels

"An eye-opening and riveting account of how guns make it into the black market and into the hands of criminals and drug lords." -Adam Winkler

From the author of El Narco and winner of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, a searing investigation into the enormous black market for firearms, essential to cartels and gangs in the drug trade and contributing to the epidemic of mass shootings.

The gun control debate is revived with every mass shooting. But far more people die from gun deaths on the street corners of inner city America and across the border as Mexico's powerful cartels battle to control the drug trade. Guns and drugs aren't often connected in our heated discussions of gun control--but they should be. In Ioan Grillo's groundbreaking new work of investigative journalism, he shows us this connection by following the market for guns in the Americas and how it has made the continent the most murderous on earth.

Grillo travels to gun manufacturers, strolls the aisles of gun shows and gun shops, talks to FBI agents who have infiltrated biker gangs, hangs out on Baltimore street corners, and visits the ATF gun tracing center in West Virginia. Along the way, he details the many ways that legal guns can cross over into the black market and into the hands of criminals, fueling violence here and south of the border. Simple legislative measures would help close these loopholes, but America's powerful gun lobby is uncompromising in its defense of the hallowed Second Amendment. Perhaps, however, if guns were seen not as symbols of freedom, but as key accessories in our epidemics of addiction, the conversation would shift. Blood Gun Money is that conversation shifter.

Author: Ioan Grillo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 02/23/2021
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.72lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.10w x 1.50d
ISBN: 9781635572780


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 12/07/2020
Kirkus Reviews 12/15/2020

About the Author
Ioan Grillo is a contributing writer at the New York Times specializing in crime and drugs. Based in Mexico City, he has also worked for Time magazine, the History Channel, CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press, and Esquire. He is the author of El Narco, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Gangster Warlords, a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and a Guardian Book of the Year.