Saturday, May 22, 2010

REPOST: The Big Mexican Gun Lie

Jeez Louise...everyone's acting like this bullshit "factoid" Little Filly Calderone spouted off about the other day about "meeelions of gons from 'Merica" is new? Come on, people. Where've you been the past 13 months or so? I wrote about this very same thing over a YEAR ago and either none of you read it or it just didn't resonate with anyone because I only had one comment.

From APRIL 04, 2009

Yeah, I saw this one coming.

The media has been touting this so-called shocking "fact" all over TV, radio, in print, and all over the Web, and from talking heads in Washington looking to get a sound byte second of publicity. They say that 90 percent of the weapons used to commit crimes in Mexico come from the United States.

Bob Schieffer of CBS News referred to it in an interview with Obama. Secretary of State Shrillary Clinton said it to reporters on a flight to Mexico City. California’s second biggest idiot, after Nancy Pelosi, Senator Dianne Feinstein, said at a Senate hearing: "It is unacceptable to have 90 percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico and used to shoot judges, police officers and mayors come from the United States."


Even William Hoover, the Assistant Director for Field Operations at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, testified to the House that "there is more than enough evidence to indicate that over 90 percent of the firearms that have either been recovered in, or interdicted in transport to Mexico, originated from various sources within the United States."

However, boys and girls, there’s a pretty big problem with this little 90 percent "statistic". It's a complete fallacy. In fact, it's not even close.

By all accounts, it's probably around 17 percent. Doing the quick math, that’s a 73% differential.

A clarification from the ATF is that "over 90 percent of the traced firearms originate from the U.S." Well, that kinda makes sense, since we do a pretty good job of keeping records on serial numbers and what not. But a large percentage of the guns recovered in Mexico don’t get sent back here for trace exams, because it is obvious from their markings that they don’t originate from the U.S. of A. Hell, a lot of them have the serial numbers filed off, and face it—we’re not the only country where guns get made.

In 2007-2008, according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Close to 6,000 were successfully traced -- and of those, 90 percent -- 5,114 to be exact, according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover -- were found to have come from the U.S., but in those same two years, according to the Mexican government, 29,000 guns were recovered at crime scenes.

In other words, 68 percent of the guns that were recovered were never submitted for tracing. And when you weed out the roughly 6,000 guns that could not be traced from the remaining 32 percent, it means 83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S.


So, if not from the U.S., where all of us bloodthirsty baby-killers and war-mongerers horde weapons in the hopes of slaying our neighbors, where do they come from? There are a variety of sources:

-- The Black Market. Mexico is a Sam’s Club for weapons, with Korean grenades, Chinese AK’s, and shoulder-fired rocket launchers from western European, Middle Eastern, and former Soviet bloc manufacturers up for sale.

-- Russian organized crime organizations. Interpol says Russian Mafia groups are actively trafficking drugs and arms in Mexico. Wait…there’s drugs in Mexico?

-- South of the Border…their border. U.S. intelligence agencies say traffickers move immigrants, stolen cars, guns, and drugs (including most of America’s cocaine) along the porous Mexican-Guatemalan border. On March 27, the Guatemalan newspaper La Hora, reported that police seized 500 grenades and a load of AK-47s on the border. Police say the cache was transported by a Mexican drug cartel operating out of the border town of Ixcan. During the late 1990s, Colombia’s home-grown terrorist group FARC established an arms smuggling and drug trafficking partnership with the Tijuana cartel, according to the Federal Research Division report from the Library of Congress.

-- The Mexican Army and Police. More than 150,000 soldiers deserted in the last six years, according to Mexican Congressman Robert Badillo. Many took their weapons with them, including the standard issue M-16 assault rifle. And as corrupt as Mexican government officials tend to be, many weapons are just outright sold to criminals or traded for drugs and other goods.


Ed Head, an Arizona firearms instructor and 24-year veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol, recently displayed an array of weapons considered "assault rifles" that are similar to those recovered in Mexico, but are unavailable for sale in the U.S.

"These kinds of guns -- the auto versions of these guns -- they are not coming from El Paso," he said. "They are coming from other sources. They are brought in from Guatemala. They are brought in from places like China. They are being diverted from the military. But you don’t get these guns from the U.S."

Some guns, he said, "are legitimately shipped to the government of Mexico, by Colt, for example, in the United States. They are approved by the U.S. government for use by the Mexican military service. The guns end up in Mexico that way -- the fully auto versions -- they are not smuggled in across the river."

The exaggeration of American "responsibility" for the crime and violence in Mexico extends even beyond the "90-percent" bullshittery. The Gun Control Lobby is using these falsehoods to more restrictive gun-control laws in the U.S. We all know how the Obamunists hate our guns.

The Mexican ambassador to the America, Auturo Sarukhan, remarkably claimed that Mexico seizes 2,000 guns a day from the United States. That would be 730,000 a year, and that's a far cry from the official statistic from the Mexican attorney general’s office, which says Mexico seized 29,000 weapons in all of 2007 and 2008.

And then you get this Jiverly Wong dickhead in Binghamton, New York. He walks into an immigration office yesterday and kills 12 people. Not illegal immigrants, mind you, but law-abiding legal immigrants preparing to take their citizenship tests. New York’s Governor Patterson is gonna use this as a springboard to further outlaw guns in New York, which in turn will fuel the nationwide anti-gun douchebags.


Hell, I couldn’t even drive through NY on my way to Maine with my .45 disassembled in a locked case in the trunk of my car without the Empire State Gestapo giving me a mandatory sentence. But that’s a blog for another day…

1 comment:

Brooke said...

Isn't it amazing how conservatives seem to always be predicting the future?

Huh.