Officer.com Looks at Mexican Gun Canard

And gets a lot of facts wrong:

An M2 Browning model .50-caliber machine gun mounted on a white Ford F-150, a homemade turret welded to the frame. A .30-caliber rifle, a Barret .50-caliber rifle on a bipod, a modified AR-15, a 30-30 rifle, parts for a 37mm grenade launcher and a couple of AK-47s, along with about 9,000 rounds and a pound and a half of cocaine.

Because we all know you can buy grenades, grenade launchers, 50 caliber machine guns, and half a kilo a cocaine at any gun show in the US right?  But it gets better:

With its liberal gun laws, Arizona is at the heart of the storm. Unlike most states, the popular semiautomatic rifles, AK-47s, AR-15s, are easily purchased with little more than a driver’s license and some forms. The large caliber rifles, like those Beltrán stored, are also for sale.

Unlike most states? Only about six states have any restrictions on semi-automatic variants of these rifles, and five of them are in the Northeast.  Most states treat them like ordinary guns because they are ordinary guns.  And since when can you just walk into a gun store anywhere in the US and just buy a Browning M2 heavy machine gun?

But nobody can explain how a .50-caliber rifle can be driven down to the Mexico border and then crossed over.

That’s easy.  It’s not happening.  They are being stolen from the Mexican military, or purchased from the military and government through corrupt channels.  I know it’s hard to believe there’s corruption in Mexico, but there is.

Then there are the grenades. April 2008: Rafael Alcantar, a Mexican man, is sentenced in federal court, charged with trying to buy a 40mm grenade launcher, three fragmentation grenades and 26 full-auto machine guns from undercover agents in Tucson.

All of which are perfectly legal in the US, you know.  I can go down to Wal-Mart right now and pick up all the fragmentation grenades I can carry!   Look, no one denies that there are guns being trafficked from the United States into Mexico, just as I’m sure there are guns being trafficked from Mexico into the United States, and we know drugs are moving across borders freely.  But why do all of these stories conflate reality by trying to make it look like the United States is some third world arms bazar where you pick up your anti-tank missiles at the local flea market?  No doubt because the purpose of these articles is something else entirely.  Otherwise they never would mention the expired federal assault weapons ban, which didn’t make either AR-15s or semi-automatic variants of the AK-47 illegal, or unobtainable.

Related posts (automatically generated):

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3 thoughts on “Officer.com Looks at Mexican Gun Canard”

  1. The ratio of kilos of drugs moving north across the US/Mex border to kilos of firearms moving south across the border = NO. COMPARISON.

  3. Here’s another interesting quote from this same biased article:

    “ATF’s official position is that grenades mostly come from the Central American black market. Armies saw massive demobilizations after the civil wars in the late 1980s — men returning home, not all empty-handed, Newell said.”

    So, I guess that even the feds are willing to concede that Mexico’s criminal element procures at least some of its military ordnance from SOUTH of Mexico’s own border. If this is their official position, then why is it so inconceivable to some of us here in the USA and elsewhere that other types of military-grade weaponry could be purchased in the same region and then get smuggled into Mexico?

    Here are two other telling quotes from this biased article:

    “The teams recover cash people try to take out of the country, and sometimes (but rarely) weapons.”

    “Weapons are hard to find,” Lopez says, standing over the shredded burlap remains of some mule’s burden of weed. “There’s no model, no rhyme to it.”

    I have never borne a burden of weed across an international border in my life, but I’ll bet that it’s still just as bulky as a duffel bag or a backpack loaded up to the brim with “popular semiautomatic rifles” purchased in a state with “liberal gun laws,” as this article tries to suggest.

    If the so-called “river of steel and lead” truly exists between the USA and Mexico as the gun-haters would have us believe, then why is it so hard for the authorities in either nation to interdict the flow on even an occasional basis?

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