The New York Times earns it’s little nickname “The Paper of Making Up the Record” in the gunny glogosphere, courtesy of SayUncle, I think (making it an Uncleism):
But it now seems clear that negotiations were never really possible. Beyond the usual hyperpartisanship on Capitol Hill, the National Rifle Association and the even more strident Gun Owners of America wanted a vote in order to push their bizarre theory that Fast and Furious was part of a secret Obama administration conspiracy to further a gun-control political agenda.
You know, one thing the media has never been able to satisfactorily explain is how Fast and Furious was supposed to work, if it wasn’t intended to just to drive up trace numbers. So we let all these guns go to Mexico, we don’t tell the Mexican government we’re doing it, and somehow this is going to result in taking down the cartel kingpins involved in gun trafficking. The only way this makes sense is if you’re so deep in the tank for the Administration you’re getting nitrogen narcosis on the brain.
Do you think that accepting the administrations story would require “The willing suspension of disbelief”?
That’s one of our opponents’ greatest skills.
The theory is bizarre, but not in the way they want me to think.
It’s bizarre that the people at Justice actually mentioned the use of such tactics as a possibility in their records on the issue.
The theory resulting from those mentions is, while bizarre because of the source material, perfectly consistent with it.
(That said, I’m not sure it was ever anyone’s conscious motive at Justice … but at the same time I don’t think the belief that it was is unjustified in context.)
Dog gone railed against those wacky conspiracy theorists, then doubled down with her own by claiming this was a gun lobby conspiracy (with the ATF) to sell a few thousand more guns.
The coordinated media push by Napolitano, Clinton & Holder after the March 2009 Mexico City conference on drug violence to push the “90% of cartel guns come from the US” nonsense also coincided with the ramping up of the F&F program. The saddest thing is, if you look at the text of the conference summaries provided by the US Embassy to the Obama cabinet members, you see that even at the conference the major source of MILITARY GRADE guns was sanctioned MILITARY sales to Latin American countries. The misinterpretation of this cable (already biased toward what the administration wanted to hear) to mean that civilian gun sales were fueling Mexican drug violence is pretty evident based on their “90%” stats being repeated like a religious, trance-inducing mantra for the next six months after the meetings:
“198860 2009-03-25 17:51:00 09MEXICO880 Embassy Mexico CONFIDENTIAL…
“…¶3. (C) Fueling Mexico’s violence is the illicit flow of weapons and ammunition to criminal organizations from the U.S. firearms market, as well as munitions from Central
American military stocks. While estimates vary regarding the percentage of U.S. commercial weapons recovered in Mexico, approximately 90 percent of all firearms seized and traced are from the United States. In contrast, at least 90 percent of military origin weapons ) such as grenades and light anti-tank weapons ) are traced to Central American military stocks. Seizure data also suggests that the weapons sought by DTOs have become increasingly higher quality and more powerful. These include the Barrett .50-caliber rifle, the Colt AR-15 .223-caliber assault rifle, the AK-47 7.62-caliber assault rifle and its variants, and the FN 5.57-caliber pistols better known in Mexico as the &cop killer.8 ”
The typo “)” indicates a hasty editing, probably by someone with little knowledge of firearms, a political ax to grind, or both, given the rest of the text. They also leave out the details that (1) civilian ownership of firearms in Mexico is banned, so all civilian-held guns are illegal, and (2) it is only 90% of the TRACEABLE weapons, both military and non-military weapons that originate in the US. They also don’t mention the # of weapons provided to the cartels by Mexico’s military or, in the case of the Zetas, that the cartels ARE the military.
The evidence is pretty clear there was a concerted effort to gin up numbers to use in restricting gun sales, but the evidence is even more clear that Napolitano, Clinton & Holder have no idea of what the true sources of weapons (or violence) in Mexico are or how to combat them. Ditto for their boss. The biggest “smoking gun” if you will that the administration is both clueless about guns and also that they hoped to use fighting cartels as a pretext for abridging RKBA is that they have done NOTHING WHATSOEVER to curb sales of military hardware to countries in the region who have been proven suppliers of the drug cartels.
Sorry for the long multiple posts, but I think this is also important to see:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-arms-race15-2009mar15,0,229992.story
“Traffickers have escalated their arms race, acquiring military-grade weapons, including hand grenades, grenade launchers, armor-piercing munitions and antitank rockets with firepower far beyond the assault rifles and pistols that have dominated their arsenals. Most of these weapons are being smuggled from Central American countries or by sea, eluding U.S. and Mexican monitors who are focused on the smuggling of semiauto- matic and conventional weapons purchased from dealers in the U.S. border.”
Even the LA Times knows the difference between military and civilian weapons, as well as the fact that Central America is awash in the former both from the wars of the 80s and continued US (and other country) sales to the region. Unfortunately, nobody in the Obama cabinet seems to have figured that out.