AFT suppling Mexican Cartels with U.S. guns...WTF!

This stuff makes you just shake our head and say WTF:

You'll recall earlier this year the president of mexico, during a visit to the U.S., complained that "90% of the guns found in raids of drug cartels were traced to guns sold in the U.S.". Hillary Clinton, Obama, and several other prominent politicians also quoted this "statistic". As it turned out, the 90% number was actually vastly over blown (i.e. they lied). IN fact according to a Fox news investigation:

"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."

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/02/myth-percent-small-fraction-guns-mexico-come/

It also turns out, during Project Gunwalker, the ATF intentionally allowed suspected gun smugglers to purchase >2500 semi-automatic firearms (575 AK-47's in one transaction by suspect at a Texas gun shop) to be purchased and transported over the border into Mexico. AFT agents protested to their superiors and pleaded in some cases to get authorization to intercept the guns "before they disappeared". Senior ATF officials stopped their own agents so they could "see what would happen" with the guns. It turns out at least one of the guns was used to kill an ATF agent (Jamie Zapata).

I wonder how many of the 5,114 guns "traced to the U.S." were from the Project Gunwalker fiasco? I'm sure the ATF will be providing those statistics real soon...

This is a classic example of how a government bureaucracy like the ATF can build itself into such a huge self interested entity that it looses sight of its original purpose and becomes focused on its own power, expansion, and influence.

In other news: the ATF is considering enacting import bans on "non-sporting shotguns". Slowly working it's way to expand gun bans through regulative means vs. legislative means (where they are loosing ground). There is no doubt the current head of the ATF is a gun grabber. Just do some research on Andrew Traver for Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Here's on of the first links Google provides: http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/politics/5230-anti-gun-zealot-nominated-to-head-atf


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