12 Comments
User's avatar
it's just Boris's avatar

Or the were made by a US company, sold to a (nominally) legitimate customer like the Mexican government, and then passed on to the cartels by the people who were supposed to be the end users (e.g. military, police).

curby's avatar

it was said during “fast and stupid” that most cartels were armed with full auto AK47s purchased from soldiers in the mexican army for a whopping $75. on average… the question was pay $400 plus from American gun dealers for semiautomatic AK or $75 for a REAL one. ..

look at some old nra magazine articles from the 70s- same old tired bullshiite.. its about control. not gun control..

CBMTTek's avatar

Exactly where I was going to go with this. Let's see...

The cartels, which have billions of dollars available to them, are going to pay someone to go to a FFL, pay full retail price for an AR-15 or other firearm, leave information that can be used to trace that firearm, and risk capture as they smuggle it into Mexico.

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OR...

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They could send an agent to factory in China or Russia, or a dealer in the middle east or Africa, and buy hundreds of full auto AKs and several hundred thousand rounds for the same price as a dozen ARs from the US?

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The people running the cartels are businessmen. Granted, their business is drugs and ruining innocent lives, but it is still a business. And no businessman is going to succeed if they choose the inefficient path for obtaining necessary supplies.

Paul Woods's avatar

"I helped sponsor a bill...cutting off the sale of American guns

to criminals...."

Ms. Wasserman, I hate to rain on your parade of sound byes, but sales of guns to criminals by FFLs has been illegal in the US for decades, Also knowingly selling to a private individual with a criminal record is illegal. Somehow, I doubt that the relatively small percentage of illegal private sales has provided enough arms to equip all the cartels in Mexico.

Tantiv V's avatar
5dEdited

Even the 80%, 90% or whatever made up statistic they're using now is a bunch of nonsense.

The percentage is 'of the guns the Mexican gov't sent to the US for tracing, of those able to be traced is...." Not the total number of guns the Federales got, not even all those sent to the US for tracing, but the number sent that were able to be traced.

Because yeah, they're not sending full auto AK's/M-4's in for tracing,or weapons they know where they came from., Nor are they sending any of the heavy weapons, explosives, etc.

Those are coming from the black market and from the countless Mexican soldiers that go AWOL and abscond w/ their equipment or just sell it directly to the cartels.

Raconteur's avatar

Damn, I'm getting tired of refuting the inane, idiotic propaganda coming out of the gun control morons.

Just because the gun control laws (that were passed with the promise that they would solve the problem of criminal misuse of firearms) are not working, the gun control hosers want another law that won't work. And when that one fails, they'll demand another, then another, ad nauseum.

it's just Boris's avatar

It does get exhausting because they never stop lying, dissembling and misleading by turns.

The problem is, it *sounds* plausible if you don't know any better, so "realfacts" need to be out there to counter the "goodfacts" people like Wasserman keep spouting.

(And props to Babylon 5 - especially that episode!)

MartyB's avatar

Gotta take exception Miguel. David doesn’t think.

Blind Archer's avatar

And apart from "Operation Fast & Furious" (part of a larger operation known as "Project Gunrunner"), they're misstating the statistic to begin with.

The 90% (or 95%) *number* is mostly correct, but they're using the wrong context. The actual statistic is "90% (or 95%) of firearms found at Mexican cartel crime scenes AND SUBMITTED TO BATFE FOR TRACING come from the American firearms market."

That context is important. Mexican cartels -- like most terrorists in the world -- use a lot of (full-auto) AK-pattern rifles, and most of their AKs came from Mexican government armories, who got them via legitimate government-to-government trades/sales from China/Russia/Poland/wherever. The point is, when a full-auto AK with Chinese/Russian/Polish markings is found at a cartel crime scene, THEY DON'T SUBMIT IT TO BATFE FOR TRACING. Why would they, since in all likelihood it was never part of the American firearms market and BATFE would have no record of it?

If they don't have a reason to suspect a gun came from America, they don't send it to BATFE, so those are not counted in that statistic. The right question is, how many guns do they recover from cartel crime scenes that DON'T get submitted to BATFE for tracing? And that's a hard question to answer, because Mexico doesn't share that with us.

But that "90%" number sure sounds scary, doesn't it? Like the kind of zero-context sound-bite that could convince low-information voters to demand more "gun control," right?

CBMTTek's avatar

Hogg is an idiot.

That 90% number is a clear demonstration of how to lie with statistics.

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Last time I saw that one, it referred to the guns they were able to trace back to a supplier, not all the guns recovered. Let's say they recovered 1000 guns after a cartel firefight. They were able to trace 10 back to the point of origin. Nine of those 10 were traceable to US sources.

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See.... 90% from the US.

(More like less than 1%, but why let reality get in the way of a good narrative?)

Reeeetired's avatar

Message to Criminals: OK, look here. You are violating existing laws. We know that. We agree, right?

So, we are going to pass even more laws on more paper (we realize you are not reading or heeding all that, but...). All we ask is that you at least give a passing thought, just a little one, to all the law-abiding folks who WILL live by the increasing controls.

Tom from WNY's avatar

Who was Viktor Bout, "The Merchant of Death"? Didn't he sell a few tons of weapons in Mexico?