koalabear
~Armed and Fuzzy~
- Joined
- Mar 14, 2001
- Posts
- 101,964
For two years, the mainstream media has been hustling the government line that federally regulated firearm dealers are the virtual sole source of firearms acquired by the multi-billion dollar Mexican drug cartels. But the truth is those vast, ruthless criminal enterprises obey no laws. As U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said during congressional hearings, the cartels are “incredibly rich—with billions of dollars of drug money. … to buy anything they want anywhere in the world in vast quantities.”
With black market surplus full-automatic AK’s and Vietnam-era M16s easily available, combined with master gun-running criminals on the level of the cartels, the notion that cartels are arming themselves from average gun stores is nuts.
To show that murder weapons in Mexico could originate in U.S. gun shops, superiors at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) made it happen through “Operation Fast and Furious.” Over the objection of gun dealers who reported suspected criminal activity, BATFE refused to allow street agents to make arrests of actual criminals and gun smugglers. All of this was done so that those guns would “walk,” thus ending up in Mexico to be traced from the scenes of bloodletting back to dealers who did everything right.
In one of the best descriptions of “Fast and Furious,” Robert Farago wrote in the Washington Times that “ …The agency’s motive for creating a program that violated Mexican sovereignty and put innocent lives at risk: inflating the number of American firearms recovered at Mexican crime scenes. The more blood-soaked American guns in Mexico the ATF could identify for its congressional paymasters, the more compelling its case for increased federal funding and new agency-enforced gun-control regulations. In short, ‘Operation Fast and Furious’ was an anti-gun-running gun-running program.”
http://www.nrapublications.org/index.php/11324/standing-guard-18/

