This Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee had a hearing on “Law Enforcement Responses to Mexican Drug Cartels“ Some of the testimony is frankly, surprising. I first heard these clips on Cam & Company on Tuesday, but now present them here for those of you who didn’t catch the show. You may have to disable your popup blocker to view some of these video clips.
- Question from Durbin to ATF about drug smuggling in Mexico
Durbin claims smuggling into Mexico is in the thousands, and asks ATF for their sense of how big the problem is. ATF retorts “I would not say it’s in the thousands, sir. I would say it’s probably in the hundreds.” Durbin pretty clearly didn’t like that answer. - Lindsey Graham questions the panel about the need for changes in gun laws
Short of is, no one on the panel says we need more gun control. The Arizona AG answers that he’d like to see tighter regulation of money transfers, but that’s all anyone agrees on. - Diane Feinstein asks what new gun laws we need.
Senator Feinstein wants to know what laws she can push to make smuggling guns into Mexico even more illegal. The laws we have now are “pretty clearly not enough,” according to the Senator. The response from the panel is that we don’t even really know the scope of the problem, and have been using current laws effectively. - Senator Feingold asks about smuggling of military hardware across the border.
The gist of it is that the military hardware isn’t coming from the United States, but from other sources. - Senator Sessions says we have plenty of guns on this side of the border, and don’t have Mexico’s levels of violence. ATF responds with the fact that most FFLs are law abiding. Sessions says we need to build a fence.
So the people on the ground aren’t calling for changes in our country’s gun laws in order to deal with the Mexican problem, apparently much to the dismay of Senators Feinstein and Durbin. We also now know those on the ground don’t believe that military grade weapons are coming from the United States, and certainly not from US gun shows. So one wonders whether the media in the United States are going to continue to blame the US for the proliferation of miltiary weapons into Mexico. I suspect that the media will ignore this testimony, but let’s hope that Congress won’t.
Thank you for posting this blog. Thanks so much.
So the people on the ground aren’t calling for changes in our country’s gun laws in order to deal with the Mexican problem, apparently much to the dismay of Senators Feinstein and Durbin.
I think I shall send my senior senator a sympathy card … and ask him to forward it on to his buddy Barb. Dickie and Feinstain. They go together.
One thing … Hoover did say hundreds of firearms per day, which is still many thousand a year and sounds rather unlikely.
The 2,000 doesn’t pass the common sense test, though, as that would be 730,000 a year. A truckload of guns a day.
Yeah, I don’t even buy a few hundred a day. But if even ATF is saying some of the claimed numbers out there are ridiculous, that should say something.
I highly suspect that this claim about so many guns from the USA (They often like to throw out this 90% figure.) winding up in Mexico is total bullshit propaganda coming directly from the worldwide gun-grabber movement – Rebecca Peters, IANSA, billionaire George Soros, et al.
First of all, I have heard figures of 100,000 or so being the number of thugs that the Mexican drug cartels have on their payrolls, and this doesn’t even include however many Mexican police and army personnel who are on the take from them, too. The logistics of acquiring 100,000 legal semi-automatic AR or AK type rifles from the USA, through even as many as 10,000 straw purchasers spread around the USA, and then getting them all back to Mexico intact, without too many of them being interdicted en route first by law enforcement, seems to me like it would be a colossal pain in the ass, one too big even for the Mexican drug cartels.
Meanwhile, I keep hearing about how hard it actually is now for legal buyers all over America to get from FFL’s any type of semi-automatic rifle that’s chambered in a military-grade caliber, thanks to the huge demand that was triggered by “birth cert” Barry’s election last November. Plus, there would be an obvious need for all that ammunition and probably extra magazines, too, but there’s also a shortage now of so many different types of ammunition in the USA, for the same reason as the shortage of the semi-automatic rifles.
Lastly, if somebody in the Mexican drug cartels also wants select-fire weaponry, then there’s the question of getting the necessary parts to convert these semi-automatic rifles to select-fire, and then the time to do these conversions, especially for AK-type rifles, which would require some precision machinist work on all of those receivers.
All of those logistical problems and associated extra costs which I have outlined above would go right away when you consider other options that these moneybag-Mexican-drug-lords would likely have for themselves instead.
First, international small arms dealers, ones like the main character played by Nicolas Cage in that “Lord of War” movie, could very well be selling military-grade weaponry to the Mexican drug cartels directly. All it would probably take is just one or two cargo containers full of firearms and other military hardware, arriving at some Mexican marine terminal every now and then, with bribes paid out to all the right people. This method would be a much more efficient way to quickly amass a sizable weapons cache than even a dozen secret smuggling tunnels under the USA-Mexico border any day.
Then there’s the Latin American crackpot and neo-Marxist dictator of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. He is believed by those in the know to be allowing cocaine export shipments to originate from his regime’s military bases for cash, ones which likely then go straight on up to Mexico. Thanks to the Russians and the Chinese, Hugo Chavez has plenty of military hardware too, so perhaps he might be selling or giving some of that as well to the Mexican drug cartels.
Furthermore, there are very likely also corrupt Mexican military personnel who are assigned to the supply facilities and armories of the Mexican military. This might be the true source for some of the Mexican drug cartel’s .50 caliber Barrett M82A1 sniper rifles. Barrett sold plenty of these rifles to the Mexican military back in the 1990’s.
If these Mexican drug cartels have the means to covertly set up whole fleets of custom-built submarines for smuggling purposes, they could very well even have some of their small arms needs met by having firearms and/or ammunition domestically made in Mexico just for them, too. That’s just what a multi-billion-dollar criminal enterprise can do.
I woke up to this hearing and was struck by how blatantly some of the anti-gun Senators were “leading the witnesses,” and struck even more by how persistently the panel refused to take the bait — even to the point of visibly irritating their questioners, a risky thing for a bureaucrat to do.
If there were a true tidal-wave of gun legislation underway, every one of those bureaucrats would have jumped at the chance to get on the gravy train for new gun-control-related powers and budget line-items.
Senator Feinstein really should be worry about her state’s imploding budget rather than assaulting the Constitution. Take care of your own house first before you try to burn mine down.
My Border Patrol friends say the cartels want serious equipment — grenades, AK-47s (the real ones), RPGs. Those probably come from various leftist guerrilla movements, with which the cartels have ties, or from bribed members of the Mexican Army.
Also “traced back to an American gun dealer” includes every gun sold in the US, including stolen ones. Press loves to suggest that it means something more immediate.
Congressional hearings are Kabuki theatre. They are only designed to get camera time for the CongressCritters and to elicit testimony in support of positions that Senators and Representatives have already decided thought the special interest groups that control them. You could have every law enforcement organization in this nation testify that guns are a good thing and the congress will ignore them all.
The hearings are the way in which Congress a) satisfies the special interest groups that control them and b) allows them to get their mugs on camera and show off and c) tell the rubes back home ‘we had hearings and I laid into the bad people on your behalf.’
Farse.
John:
You’re absolutely correct about it being a farce, and theater. But if the Dems were taking gun control seriously, you would have heard different testimony. What you hear is Durbin and Feinstein playing up the issue for their interest groups, and that’s about it. They know that whatever they want, they don’t have the votes to pass anything, and Harry Reid hasn’t exactly been friendly to gun control.
There’s another point that I don’t see anybody raising. The guns being used in Mexico are selective fire. The guns sold up here are semiautomatic replicas of those selective fire military rifles.
What that means is that if guns were coming from here, they’d have to be converted to selective fire in order to meet the specifications of the Narcotrafficantes.
Now ATF is starving for arrests. That’s why they screwed with that poor guy Olafson. If those guns were being converted, how come we don’t see any arrests of people running underground conversion operations. How come we’re not seeing any arrests for illegal manufacture of a National Firearms Act firearm, and why aren’t there any trafficking cases?
In short, there’s a big fat hole in what the Feds call “The Stream of Illegal Commerce”. Those guns don’t convert themselves. If the propaganda being pushed by those idiots Feinstein and Durban was true, there’d be arrests of underground gunsmiths doing the conversions and there aren’t any, because nobody is doing that. You can’t create felony convictions out of thin air.
In short, any and every time somebody mentions crap about those guns coming from here, we need to call bullshit and ask the questions that I mentioned above. At some time, maybe the MSM will get embarassed at pushing a line that they can’t even rationally believe in– maybe,……
Michael Shirley:
Perhaps you missed the following paragraph (Yes, I know I wrote a lot there, but it’s all valid.) from my earlier comment above:
Lastly, if somebody in the Mexican drug cartels also wants select-fire weaponry, then there’s the question of getting the necessary parts to convert these semi-automatic rifles to select-fire, and then the time to do these conversions, especially for AK-type rifles, which would require some precision machinist work on all of those receivers.
You are spot on about the point you have made otherwise though – “sporter” versions of military-type rifles, the same ones being widely sold across the USA, would have to be converted by a cadre of “underground gunsmiths” before they could become the select-fire weapons that we often have been seeing getting seized from the Mexican drug cartels.
As I pointed out above, the logistics of doing all of this converting enough just to arm thousands upon thousands of Mexican drug cartel thugs would be simply far too overwhelming, as opposed to just dealing with an black market arms dealer, or the dictator of a rogue nation in Latin America.
Hal, you’re right. I was mostly agreeing with you.
That said, it’s amazing the lengths that certain politicians in Mexico, the US and government types will go, in order to gin up a myth about guns coming from here when it’s not true.