Excerpt from Blood Gun Money by Ioan Grillo, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

There is a painful paradox here. The United States lives with heavily armed criminals, and suffers the worst murder rates and highest number of police shootings in the developed world. But it still has relatively strong law enforcement that keeps organized crime in check. In contrast, Latin American countries suffer weak institutions that cannot contain the gun-toting gangsters. The weapons there fuel a hybrid of crime and war, a relentless conflict that confounds politicians and unleashes a refugee crisis.

Investigators have long divided gun trafficking into two areas: the deals between mobsters, seen as a domestic issue, and gunrunning over borders to war zones, seen as an international one. But this distinction is increasingly blurred, and America's iron river flows into these hybrid conflicts, or "crime wars," mixing with the arms from the charred Cold War battlegrounds.

The gun lobby is correct in pointing out that people who break the law to get firearms commit most murders. But then it has fought the policing of the gun black market, defending the loopholes and achieving crazy limits on law enforcement of firearms. The result is that it effectively defends the criminal market in guns used by cartels and corner hoods.

Part of this is explained by following the money. Gun companies profit from the black market like almost no other industry does. But digging into the gun business reveals wonky economics, and it is not as profitable as many would believe—or claim. Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association (NRA) makes money by selling a "gun lifestyle," and has transformed into a media machine in the culture war. And it profits from fighting a fundamentalist battle with no compromise. America's iron river is born out of the nation's unique, if mutating, gun culture.

Still, this book is not a rant against the Second Amendment or the right of law-abiding citizens to have guns. It looks at the measures that could reduce trafficking to criminals, while garnering wide support, and reduce the hundreds of billions of dollars of drug money financing gangs and cartels. As lawmakers and the wider society look for a new way forward on guns, drugs, and policing, it is crucial to understand the complexities of the black market. To forge effective enforcement, politicians have to hear from the dirty streets about how gangsters operate. The tales of crime bosses are not just food for Netflix but have become key to governance in the twenty-first century.

I tell the story of the iron river in twelve chapters, each focusing on a different angle linked to gun trafficking in the Americas. I trace the life of a gun from the factory to a Mexican murder scene; talk to men who bring firepower onto the corners of Baltimore; follow an undercover ATF agent who rode with bikers; track guns through the jungles of the Darién Gap; document the struggles in a Texas hospital ward after a mass shooting; and look at a drug cartel assembling its own AR-15s. To tell these stories, I talk to agents and traffickers, to gun sellers and peace activists, to presidents and protesters, to gunshot victims and gun shooters, to militiamen and murderers.

The iron river has sources and tributaries; it meanders into strange ground and bursts open like an estuary. Following the guns leads to all kinds of places: the ATF trace center in West Virginia working with bizarre restrictions, the Colombian war half a continent away, a factory in the Black Forest of Germany.

The tales are interwoven, with some of the same characters, and guns, floating between them. I trace the forces and institutions that have shaped them, from the development of gun technology to the parallel histories of the ATF and the gun lobby. They are not an A to Z of the continent's arms smuggling, as the web is too big and snarled. But they show different elements that together paint a portrait of the world's bloodiest racket—and of the flailing fight by law enforcement to stop it.

Excerpted from Blood Gun Money by Ioan Grillo. Copyright © 2021 by Ioan Grillo. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.