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It’s no coincidence that NBC’s Rachel Maddow and The Comedy Channel’s Jon Stewart have pilloried the NRA in recent shows. They’ve been “inspired” by the ATF’s mounting Gunwalker scandal. Congressional investigators have established a connection between the “Guns for Goons” program and the White House. The President continues to stonewall; his Counsel has evoked Executive Privilege. As the repulsive facts about the federal conspiracy to commit murder continue to emerge, the left is launching a simple counter-attack: why would he do that? Where’s the President’s anti-gun agenda? It’s a good question . . .
The left-leaning commentator and comedian are correct: President Obama has not grabbed guns. There has been no major federal gun control initiative since Obama assumed office. If the President was going to champion gun control in any form, he would have done so after Jared Lee Loughner’s attack on Representative Gabriel Giffords. He could have thrown his weight behind a move to ban “high-capacity” magazines. But he didn’t.
For whatever reason—practical politics or personal conviction—the current President is not, by his actions at least, anti-gun. It’s also true that the National Rifle Association’s strident attacks on the President have not reflected reality. The sound bites used by the left’s media mouthpieces are not taken out of context. When it comes to Wayne LaPierre’s anti-Obama rhetoric, it is what it isn’t.
That said, it is theoretically possible that a re-elected President Obama, freed from political necessity, could launch an attack on gun rights. He certainly has some “history” in that regard; most notably the Commander-in-Chief’s past association with the virulently anti-gun Joyce Foundation. But the chances of any such initiative making it through an increasingly conservative-minded legislature are somewhere between none and none.
Which bring us to the key piece of evidence supporting the “Gunwalker as gun grabbing” meme: the ATF’s new long gun registry regulation. This reg requires some 8500 border-dwelling gun stores to report multiple sales of semi-automatic rifles within 24 hours of the deal, to provide investigative leads for the ATF so they can stop the “Iron River” or guns flowing to Mexican drug cartels.
In the light of Operation Fast and Furious, during which the ATF created an “Iron River” of guns flowing to Mexican drug cartels, the long gun registry would be better termed a “long gun travesty.” The ATF’s regulatory chutzpah is currently held up in court. Meanwhile, it serves as exhibit A that the President’s launching “under the radar” gun control initiatives.
Yes, well, the “under the radar” remark was reported by reps for The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence at a failed, post-Loughner spree killing “gun summit.” We don’t know if Obama actually made the promise, or if he was serious if he did.
In any case, the long gun registry is a singular move. There is nothing else in Obama’s presidential record or waiting in the West Wing (as far as we know) on the gun control front. Meanwhile . . .
Click on the link to Maddow’s misegos and skip to 3:03. There’s the expected disinformation: her hurried remark that 2000 guns were loose on the streets “for a time” (in fact over 1000 ATF-enabled firearms are still out there, somewhere). And then Maddow takes on Mike Vanderboegh of the Sipsey Street Irregulars.
Maddow does the flashback thing to recall the gun blogger’s exhortation to break Democratic reps’ and operatives’ windows, which included not-so-veiled threats of firearms-based violence . . . More importantly, Maddow dismisses Mike’s “Fast and Furious as gun grabbing conspiracy” with a simple wave of her hand.
And that’s because the explanation lacks credibility. It may be true. On its own, the ATF has enough anti-gun rights animus to cook-up any number of [allegedly] well-intentioned non-legislative schemes to limit Americans’ access to guns (e.g., the new long gun registry).
Mind you, pimping for money and power by inflating Mexican confiscation stats on American guns by letting American guns go to Mexico sounds implausible. Why not just manipulate the stats (again)?
The new long gun registry is equally fantastic. Let guns walk to stop guns walking and record multiple gun purchases to help us generate leads to gunwalkers that we might let walk guns? Uh, OK.
But again, there’s a bigger picture here. A landscape of U.S. foreign policy disaster in which ATF operations Fast and Furious, Wide Receiver, Castaway and Grenadewalker occurred. foxnews.com:
Five years after President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against Mexico’s five main drug cartels, the nation is now dominated by two powerful organizations that appear poised for a one-on-one battle to control drug markets and trafficking routes . . .
Mexican federal authorities, who asked not to be named for security reasons, told The Associated Press that the Zeta and Sinaloa cartels are now the nation’s two dominant drug traffickers. One or the other is present almost everywhere in Mexico, but officials are braced to see what happens next in a drug war that has already claimed an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 lives. So far, the signs are not hopeful.
What happens next is what’s happening now and what was happening when Fast and Furious was aborn: the two cartels will fight with mind-bending brutality to grab the tens of billions of dollars in tax-free cash money flowing from the U.S. to Mexico. The most important aspect of this struggle as it relates to Gunwalker: the American government has a skin in the game.
The Mexican government is closely “allied” to the Sinaloa cartel against Los Zetas. With U.S. help, the Mexican military (most lately Navy Spec Ops) are focusing all their anti-cartel efforts on Los Zetas, who threaten to “disrupt” (as in stage a military coup) in the 2012 elections. I repeat, with U.S. help: money, training, arms, ammunition, drone- and satellite-based intel, planning, coordination and even American air bases.
All the ATF’s various gun smuggling black bag jobs delivered weapons to Sinaloas and/or their friends, both here and in Honduras. The ATF coordinated logistics with an alphabet soup of federal agencies. Were they all motivated/directed by the White House to increase public pressure for stricter U.S. gun control or did the ops having something more to do with what it said at the top of the authorization forms: Mexican narco-terrorists?
That is a can of worms with which the left cannot deal. Gun-grabbing paranoia? Thanks to the NRA’s reliance on scare tactics to fill their coffers, left-leaning media pros can shoot down anti-2a analysis more easily than a Zeta can take down a helicopter with a U.S. made .50 cal (and yes, they have tried). Obama administration logistical support for and (it must be said) against narco-terrorists? Good luck with that.
I don’t know if the Gunwalker narrative will shift from anti-gun rights analysis to an expose of our role in the conflagration of violence, terror and political upheaval south of the border; the stomach-turning civil war that threatens to vomit millions of Mexican refugees across our border. That may depend on one thing: the facts.
Follow the money? No. Follow the guns. Oh, and grenades.