When it comes to the Fast and Furious debacle, the predominate Armed Intelligentsia party line is that from the start, Fast and Furious was a deep cover operation perpetrated by the Obama administration to provide justification for stronger gun control here in the United States. While, I personally like that theory as it supports some of my underlying suspicions of the Obama administration, I have to also consider the fact that the explanation given by Eric Holder might actually be accurate . . .
Is it in fact possible that things played out exactly as he has maintained – namely that it was indeed an operation actually intended to ferret out cartel gun buyers that went horribly wrong? There is absolutely no argument that people in relatively high levels of the government made some judgement errors of the highest order and those people should indeed pay with their jobs (if not incur some jail time), but perhaps there really was no sinister underlying anti-2A intent.
The issue of the illegal long gun registration on the border states could certainly be construed as step B in some nefarious plan, but it could also be simply the move of an opportunistic president to take advantage of a really bad situation to further his anti-2A agenda.
Now there’s also, of course, the issue of the claim of Executive Privilege. Certainly this is correctly viewed as the president attempting to cover his butt along with the butts of his respective staffers, but perhaps the only thing being covered up is staggering ineptitude as opposed to a nefarious plot.
The difficult part of believing that this was a planned attack on gun owners from day one is that for it to have worked, it would have required enormous planning with a lot of people being in on the game from the beginning. Given the amazing ineptitude of our current government, I have a hard time believing they could have constructed such a complex plan and expected it to actually work as intended.
Furthermore, the Federal Government has more leaks than a rusty sieve. With the number of people who would have had to have been read in on the plan from start to finish, the expectation that no one would talk to the press would have been monumentally naive. The president may many things, but a naive fool isn’t one of them. And Eric Holder is no dummy either.
The underlying problem is that we will likely never know. The claim of Executive Privilege has, at least for now, stymied Congressional attempts to get to the bottom of things. In the end, whatever the underlying plan was, the operation went horribly wrong and Eric Holder should at the very least lose his job. But whether this was just a monumental screw-up or a determined attack on Second Amendment rights will likely remain an unanswered question. I’d certainly like to continue to believe it was a plan to deprive gun owners of their rights, but I have to admit that the available facts support more than one possible conclusion.