The Jordan Harbinger Show

Ioan Grillo (@ioangrillo) is a contributing writer at The New York Times specializing in crime and drugs. He is the author of El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency; Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America; and Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels. [This is part two of a two-part episode. Make sure to check out part one here!] What We Discuss with Ioan Grillo: The Iron River may sound like something you'd find on a map of Westeros, but it's just a quaint term for the 200,000 guns manufactured or sold in the US moving across the border to Mexico every year. The private-sale loophole that allows "collectors" in the US to sell guns without requiring identification, background checks, or paperwork — often to criminals and cartels at a tidy profit. How "straw buyers" — that is, people with clean records — are paid by gun traffickers to pass background checks and buy firearms en masse without raising any red flags. If they are arrested in the