I suppose it’s human nature. Why wouldn’t the media focus on comely killers rather than the garden variety gun-toting cartel members who’ve raped, tortured and slaughtered thousands of their compatriots? In the same way, we’re getting a new spate of articles about Mexican gun smuggling rather than anything about U.S. government sales to the Mexican Army and police (which seep to the cartels). Check this from azstarnet.com . . .
As many as 120,000 people have been violently killed since 2006 in Mexico and about half of them were organized-style homicides that often involved the use of high-powered firearms imported illegally from the United States, according to a study from the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute and the Igarape Institute, a research center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Hey, anyone remember Fast and Furious? You know; the scandal wherein the ATF enabled the sale of over 2000 U.S. gun store guns to members of the Sinaloa cartel, one of which a rip crew used to murder U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. At the time Uncle Sam was busy trying to convince Americans that lax U.S. gun laws armed Mexican drug thugs.
Would those guns count as legal or illegal? Anyway, what goes around comes around. Or, if you prefer, we’re seeing more of the same old you-know-what in a more recent wrapper. To wit:
It’s not known exactly how many firearms are smuggled into Mexico from the United States each year, but Nogales, Sonora, municipal President Ramón Guzmán said it’s a lot easier to purchase firearms in the United States than it is in Mexico.
The Mexican military estimates that less than 1 percent of firearms in Mexico are legally registered and 90 percent of firearms are used for criminal purposes.
The likelihood that many of the guns seized by Chief Novoa’s officers come from the United States is very high, he said, due to the city’s proximity to the United States.
About 87 percent of firearms seized by Mexican authorities and traced in the last five years originated in the United States, a Government Accountability Office report found in 2009.
Many of the firearms come from gun shops and shows in Southwest border states.
“More gun control will help us in every type of crime, from vehicle theft to homicides. Even our own cops get killed with these same weapons.”
Reality check time. Once again, the GAO guns represent a small fraction of all the guns confiscated by the Mexican authorities. But they are all the guns they submitted for ATF trace. Do the Mexicans submit guns with “Property of the Mexican Army” or “Property of the Mexican Police” etched on the side? No.
According to elpasotimes.com, we’re talking about 68,161 recovered firearms. Here’s an idea: how about the Mexican or American government give us a list of the make, model and serial number for all of Mexico’s confiscated guns? The information was available before Fast and Furious. It would tell us exactly how many guns came from where.
Needless to say, there’s a reason why the Obama Administration isn’t forthcoming on the true origin of these firearms or, equally, the numbers of firearms exported legally to police and military south of the border.
How much of the Merida Initiative’s $1.1 billion (since 2008) for “counterdrug activities” was spent on exporting US-made small arms? Especially the AR15/M16/M4 platform now seen everywhere in Mexico. How many guns have we sent to Mexico legally? Knowing that over 100k troops defected to the cartels.
It’s an important question, given that the Obama Administration is working with the U.N. to create an arms treaty that would establish protocols to track the legal shipment of arms around the globe.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the Obama administration that wants to ban military-style rifles (and high capacity magazines) from the public at the same time it’s shipping actual military rifles into a country where tens of thousands of guns “go walkies” (a.k.a., seep) to narco-terrorists.
But the media continues to parrot the government’s line: our gun laws are their problem. Go figure.