HOUSTON, Dec. 13 (UPI) -- Retailers in Houston sell more guns seized by police in Mexican drug wars than any other American city, officials said.
Additionally, Texas sells more such weapons than any other state in the United States, The Washington Post reported.
Among the 300 gun retailers in Houston, no store sold more guns traced from south of the border than Carter's Country stores.
Bill Carter, 76, has operated four Carter's Country stores in the Houston metro area in the past 50 years, and in the past two years, more than 115 guns from his stores have been seized by the police and military, the report said.
That doesn't mean Carter is doing anything illegal, officials said.
"One of the reasons that Houston is the No. 1 source, you can go to a different gun store for a month and never hit the same gun store," said J. Dewey Webb, special agent in charge of the Houston field division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "You can buy (a 9mm handgun) down along the border, but if you come to Houston, you can probably buy it cheaper because there's more dealers, there's more competition."
Because Mexico severely restricts gun ownership, drug cartels find ways to buy guns in the United States, the newspaper said.
"This is not a new phenomenon," Webb said.
More than 60,000 U.S. guns of all types were recovered in Mexico in the past 4 years.
