"90% of Mexacan Crime Weapons Come from U.S."

I've never been a fan of Wayne LaPierre, but he said something last month that struck a sympathetic chord in my psyche:

"If the only guys with guns are the bad guys, we're screwed!"

It doesn't get much plainer than that.

Lately, we've heard that ""90 percent of the guns used by Drug Cartels in Mexico came from the United States". (CNN is touting that message.)

Here's what it looks like on You Tube:

Perhaps it's passe' to contradict CNN, but Fox News did just that last Thursday:

There's just one problem with the 90 percent "statistic" and it's a big one:

It's just not true.

In fact, it's not even close. The fact is, only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the U.S.

What's true, an ATF spokeswoman told FOXNews.com, in a clarification of the statistic used by her own agency's assistant director, "is that over 90 percent of the traced firearms originate from the U.S."

But a large percentage of the guns recovered in Mexico do not get sent back to the U.S. for tracing, because it is obvious from their markings that they do not come from the U.S.

"Not every weapon seized in Mexico has a serial number on it that would make it traceable, and the U.S. effort to trace weapons really only extends to weapons that have been in the U.S. market," Matt Allen, special agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told FOX News.

Fox News goes further to suggest:

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 they don't come from the U.S., where DO they come from?

Fox lists "other sources", including:

• The Black Market
• Russian Crime Organizations
• South America
• Asia
• The Mexican Army
• Guatamala

Ed Head, a firearms instructor in Arizona who spent 24 years with 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."

Many of the fully automatic weapons that have been seized in Mexico cannot be found in the U.S., but they are not uncommon in the Third World.

The Mexican government said it has seized 2,239 grenades in the last two years -- but those grenades and the rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) are unavailable in U.S. gun shops. The ones used in an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey in October and a TV station in January were made in South Korea. Almost 70 similar grenades were seized in February in the bottom of a truck entering Mexico from Guatemala.

Here's the way the subject is parsed by Wayne LaPierre, spokesman for the National Rifle Association:

Jim Shepherd, of The Shooting Wire, offers his observations:

Yesterday, I was pleased to notice that "mainstream" media had begun to question the absurd statements being made by US officials concerning the "iron river" of firearms flowing from the United States into Mexico.

For the past weeks, we've heard politicians, bureaucrats and supposedly informed law enforcement officials blame the flow of US firearms into Mexico for that country's reversion back into its old, violent, ways. Today, the other side of our long, common border with the United States looks like some backwater dictatorship. Violence is no longer the exception, it's the rule, with drug cartels fighting it out with each other -and occasionally a corrupt Mexican police force.

Infuriatingly, high-ranking US officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have continued to spout inaccurate statistics that blame the US firearms industry and our retail system for the Mexican violence. They say ninety percent of all the illegal guns in Mexico come from the United States, purchased in legal or illegal transactions, then smuggled into Mexico to arm the cartels.

That is not a statistical fib, it is an absolute bald-faced lie. To repeat something you know isn't true makes whomever repeats it a bald-faced liar as well.

Unfortunately, it demonstrates this new administration's complete and utter disdain for the rest of us. They believe we're as incapable of questioning them as we are of deciding our own futures.

Fortunately, not everyone is buying into the lie.

With Mexican cartel battles involving full-auto rifles, grenades and other military-style weaponry, even the most naive reporter should eventually question officials saying they're being procured in the United States. A reader's note the other day asked "can you get me an address on those Texas gun stores where I can get the machine guns and rocket launchers that are being smuggled into Mexico? I'd like to have some of that for myself."

Finally, some hard questions are being asked.

In San Diego, KGTV television's investigative unit used a forensic firearms consultant to inspect a Mexican army cache of seized weapons. Based on those findings, it was obvious to consultant Marc Halcon that what was being stated by government officials as fact and parroted by reporters was not accurate. In fact, he reported that while US gun shops were getting the blame for supplying the cartels with weapons, the real fact was that many of the high-powered weapons the criminals were using come from the U.S. government. They had been given to the Mexican military to fight the cartels. Instead, it appears they were taken to the cartels by the more than 1,200 soldiers per month who go AWOL from the Mexican army - apparently taking their firearms with them. Since 2000, an average of 16,000 soldiers have deserted.

You do the math on the number of military firearms that could put into circulation.

Thursday, Fox News reported the government statistics, were simply wrong. More disturbingly, they reported, ATF officials didn't seem to be interested in doing anything to correct the inaccuracy.

Truth be told, only a small percentage of the tens of thousands of illegal weapons seized in Mexico each year come from the United States.

The statistic being quoted doesn't refer to the total number of weapons seized, only the ones with marking that allow them to be traced. Tens of thousands of illegal military weapons aren't traced, they're warehoused.

As the old expression goes, there are three kinds of lies: plain old lies, damned lies and statistics.

Still, the Obama Administration (in the person of A.G. Eric holder) seems determined to use this Not Ready For Prime Time moment to build momentum for a rejuvenation of the Assault Weapons Ban. This assumption is based on Obama's past history of support for Gun Control measures which would restrict Second Amendment rights ot by restricting access to firearms per se, but by restricting ammunition availability by enacting laws (eg: Microstamping and Bullet Encoding) which are prohibitively expensive to establish in an industrial manufacturing process.

Even if the Obama administration is too shy to prohibit access to firearms, this might seem to be an attractive alternative to meet the same end. That is, the practical imposition of legal means to meet an illegal objective: "imposition of laws to restrict firearms ownership" by "other means".

Essentially, making ammunition prohibitively expensive has the same effect on Firearms Ownership as making gasoline prohibitively expensive has on Automobile Ownership: if you can't buy gasoline, you can't use your automobile. Similarly, if you can't buy ammunition, you can't use your firearm.


It may be that this entire thesis is flawed; Obama may have no intention to restrict the private ownership of firearms, nor to impose such legal access to ammunition as will render the firearms useless.

Still, the American Public seems convinced. Political Pundits have often expressed the homily that Americans "Vote with their wallets". This is a reflection of the basic tenets of Capitalism (a dirty word in the Obama Admistration.)

What we have seen in the ten weeks since the enshrinement of Barack Obama is that the American Public has rushed to buy guns and ammunition, to the point at which the Manufacturers have been unable to supply the Retailers sufficiently to meet the spike in Consumer Demand.

If all those people who are rushing to buy guns and ammunition had voted AGAINST Nero, he would today be nothing more than than the Junior Senator from Illinois.

Why didn't they "cleave to their Guns and their God" in November?