Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on the morning of Tuesday, July 16. Photo: Presidencia

By KELIN DILLON

During his daily morning press conference on Tuesday, July 16, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) urged U.S. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump to regulate arms sales in the United States, a request made following the failed assassination attempt on Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally on Saturday, July 13.

López Obrador requested that Biden and Trump, opponents in the current U.S. presidential race, sign a joint pact promising to address the country’s ongoing arms crisis no matter who wins the election in “an act of good faith in search of unity and peace.”

“I believe that it would be a welcome act for the Americans if the two candidates signed a commitment to regulate the sale of weapons in the United States,” said AMLO. “This would be a first step, although other causes that are there must be addressed because this is a social crisis, and we must confront it, we must get to the bottom of it, we must return to the morality of the founders of this great nation.”

“I think that this morality has been lost and there is a social breakdown in the United States, and that cannot be fixed with coercive measures alone,” continued the federal executive. “The regulations of weapons use will help because it is a message of peace, of unity of all the people of the United States and how, despite the differences, because that is democracy, these differences can be faced peacefully and democratically, without violence.”

AMLO also highlighted that 75 percent of the approximately 50,000 weapons seized by authorities in Mexico during his six-year term were smuggled in from the United States.

“I think it would help a lot to control the sale of weapons in the United States,” added López Obrador, “It is something that needs to be done urgently. If we seized 50,000, imagine how many arms actually come into Mexico, because we cannot seize them all and in the United States they can buy guns in a supermarket. This cannot continue this way.”

Addressing Saturday’s attack on Trump, AMLO said “we are pleased and we feel good that nothing happened to former President Trump, we celebrate that nothing serious happened.”