We’ve had the Mexican canard with us for a while, that 90% of the guns recovered by the Mexican Police come from the United States.  Since the Mexican gun canard doesn’t seem to be doing its intended job, now we have the Jamacian Gun Canard, complete with its own 80% figure:
The volume is much less than the flow of U.S. guns into Mexico that end up in the hands of drug cartels — Jamaican authorities recover fewer than 1,000 firearms a year. But of those whose origin can be traced, 80 percent come from the U.S., Jamaican law enforcement officials have said in interviews with The Associated Press.
How much you want to bet that figure is how many guns are submitted to BATF for tracing, and actually do trace to US sources. I guess the Jamacian authorities aren’t quite as good at identifying US markings as the Mexican authorities, so they couldn’t quite make the 90% figure by submitting only firearms they were sure would trace.
This is pure idiocy. I’ve worked in the Caribbean before (Haiti, mainly), and you can easily break the weapons down into three categories, from most common to least common:
1) Drug guns, mainly South American AK’s, Ingrams, and cheap pistols (Makarovs, Tokarevs, whatever the cartels could acquire on the surplus markets or steal in their countries).
2) UN Surplus: M-16’s, FAL’s, Hi-Powers, 1911’s.
3) Local corruption-provided weapons; these are the guns that are purchased legitimately by the country’s military and police forces and then end up in the cartels’ hands. In Haiti, at least, this is how the gangs ended up with MP5s.
The notion that presumably foreign-born and non-naturalized smugglers are risking their necks in the states for a recorded straw purchase in order to smuggle weaponry back to an island with several other sources of cheaper, more effective weaponry is ludicrous at best. I’d imagine that most of the US-sourced guns were probably legitimate sales to entities of the Jamaican government that ended up in the wrong hands.
Jamaican me crazy!
They are trying to create the illusion of a crisis. First mexico, then jamaica. I would bet this year there will be at least 6 more countries added to that list by the end of the year. All the same conclusions of 80%-90% of guns coming from America.
Since the Mexico canard is failing they will blow it out of proportion and rely on people illgocal emotions to get the best of them to give up their liberties.
Yea, I agree this whole discussion is idiotic.
Focusing on civilian small arms smuggling is pointless so long as any government can straw purchase in vast bulk for the local cartel. I mean, that’s essentially what we’re talking about, right? Since governments always buy in bulk, they can easily purchase the weapons for far lower prices than the cartels, who can and will pay relatively high prices.
Once you’ve got weapons that are cheap to buy and expensive to sell, the business case pretty much makes itself- any corrupt bureaucrat with the authority to sign a piece of paper will be importing or manufacturing as many weapons as the cartels are willing to buy from him.
The really sad thing is that some piss-pot of a country like Jamaica can buy essentially anything it wants from machine guns to helis to anti-tank rockets and nobody blinks so much as an eye despite knowing full well that a lot of thus stuff will end up in the hands of criminals.
But tell these same people that some ordinary citizen has done a halfass full auto conversion to his plinking rifle, and they go apeshit and demand he be made into an example.
“But of those whose origin can be traced…”
Translation – stand by for a whopper.
Sounds to me like they all got the same flyer from the brady bunch.