Conffederate
Confederate

April 02, 2009

KA-BOOM: "Ninety-Percent" Lie Goes Up in Smoke

I've said before that the anti-gun forces in this country must lie about the horrors of firearms, because reality won't to stoke a level of fear that would convince the American people to give up their Constitutional rights.

An anti-gun lie being pushed hard recently is that 90 % of the guns used to commit violent crime in Mexico come from the United States. Democrats favoring more gun control have been hammering that claim repeatedly, claiming the violence in Mexico justifies further restrictions here in the United States.

That lie, favored by our media, our Attorney General, and our President, is now circling the drain.

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. By all accounts, it's probably around 17 percent.

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.

So where are the 83-percent of guns coming from, if they aren't coming from the United States?

Shockingly, cartels that exist to smuggle large quantities of illegal drugs internationally also have the ability to smuggle large quantities of illegal weapons internationally as well. Who knew?

Well, anyone with the slightest bit of integrity.

The super-majority of firearms that have turned up in the hands of Mexican cartels came from black market sources, Central and South American revolutions, are smuggled in from Asia, or come from deserters of the Mexican military.

We should hope that President Obama's administration, members of Congress, and media outlets that reported the 90-percent lie will be as honest as Fox News was, and put this myth to rest.

I have hope, but not expectations.

Update: An interesting take on Mexico's gun laws and gun culture from the inside.

Posted by Confederate Yankee at April 2, 2009 11:43 AM
Comments

I have been saying the same thing to every on line blog and to every onair personalty I can ever sence they started to report this LIE!!!!
anyone with any comen sence can figer out that you arnt going to pay $1000 + on one simiauto and try to convert it to full auto when for the same money on the black market you can get two cases of full auto and all the ameo you can cary!!

Posted by: Rich in KC at April 2, 2009 10:59 AM

Don't forget the ones that they don't bother to ask the ATF to trace. Like the cartel guns that have numbers that match Mexican property books.

Those .50 cal Barretts they keep showing are the same model down to the BUIS that the Mexican military uses.

Posted by: Spade at April 2, 2009 12:03 PM

That makes so much sense! Why go an hour drive across a desert for your guns when you can get them from the other side of the planet?

They export drugs to distant lands because of the laws of supply and demand, they import American weapons for the exact same reason. They can charge more for the former and pay less for the latter.

Sorry to drop logic, I know it never sits well with you.

Posted by: salvage at April 2, 2009 12:18 PM

They get "arms from the other side of the planet" because you can't get fully-automatic weapons, hand grenades, RPGs, rifle grenades, and grenade launchers from U.S. gun stores, you idiot.

Also, because of supply and demand that you obviously don't understand, you can get fully automatic weapons such AK-47s for less than $50-$100 dollars on the black market in some areas, whereas you will have to pay $900 or more for semi-automatic copies purchased in gun stores here.

You dropped your logic, all right.

Appears to have been broken badly in the fall.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at April 2, 2009 12:25 PM

Ah, the obligatory leftie troll has arrived already.

Kid, why would they spend more on a US gun, then risk detection bringing it into Mexico, when they can fly the exact same gun into Mexico cheap on an aircraft also carrying a few hundred kilos of cocaine from Colombia?

And in Colombia there's no waiting times, no need to present papers when buying the thing, so there's no need to pay expensive bribes to people with no criminal record (because in the US their usual contacts can't legally buy a gun because they are known criminals and those can't buy guns legally).

So even of the 17% guns that might come from the US, the majority is likely black market anyway, and stricter laws against victims defending themselves from criminals (which is all that your friends in the anti-gun lobby are after) won't stop them being sold anyway.

Posted by: J.T. Wenting at April 2, 2009 12:28 PM

Uh-huh

Keen to help, Mr Goddard spent months building a case alleging that George Iknadosian, the owner of a Phoenix gun shop, had knowingly sold some 700 assault weapons to “straw men” working for the narcos. It could have been a landmark case. Mr Iknadosian pleaded not guilty, and last month a state judge threw out all the charges against him on a point of law. Prosecutors blamed a clash between federal and state law on arms smuggling.

Yeah, I know, he was probably the only one.

And there's this little leftover from St. Ronnie Reagen's days of arms dealing not just with the Iranians:

These groups appear to be taking advantage of a robust global black market and porous borders, especially between Mexico and Guatemala. Some of the weapons are left over from the wars that the United States helped fight in Central America, U.S. officials said.

Posted by: salvage at April 2, 2009 01:03 PM

The troll just can't concede the point, can he?

Yes, Iknadosian and a small percentage of other gun dealers have participated in strawman purchases that contribute to some of the guns used by the cartels. Other guns being trafficked are stolen. That's most of the 17-percent.

Another unstated percentage of weapons are the remainders of left-overs Central American campaigns... I can only imagine the kind of condition these overly-sensitive guns are in after decades of jungle humidity and poor maintenance. They're probably good for 1-2 percent of the total, but we'll call it 3 to give us an even 20% overall of cartel guns that in some way touched American hands at some point.

Fine.

That still doesn't change in any way the fact that the Obama Administration and his gun grabbing lackeys in Congress and the media cited a massive lie time and again as a reason to undermine the Constitution--you know, what shrieking liberals claimed Bush did throughout his Presidency.

I'm just looking forward to the day that salvage and his fellow travelers finally realize that Obama has every character flaw that they hated in Bush, but worse.

The sounds of their heads popping from the cognitive dissonance will be deafening.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at April 2, 2009 02:04 PM

"Yes, Iknadosian and a small percentage of other gun dealers have participated in strawman purchases that contribute to some of the guns used by the cartels. Other guns being trafficked are stolen. That's most of the 17-percent."

Exactly.

Let us not forget that places like this exist all over the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9xf62PKC5M

Why pay top dollar for a semi auto AR when you can pay bottom dollar for an AK, or bottom dollar for an M16 that is thirty years old and has been all over the world?

Posted by: Matt at April 2, 2009 02:08 PM

Logic. Hmm. Here are the facts:

(1) Fully automatic weapons are not available for sale in gun shops, and are so restricted as to be essentially impossible to buy, such transactions taking many months and the intense involvement of local government, the BATFE and the FBI, at minimum.

(2) Other military hardware such as hand grenades, rocket propelled grenades, other explosives and shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles cannot be legally purchased in the USA.

(3) Semiautomatic carbines and rifles that resemble actual military weapons, such as the M-16 family, are very difficult to find and very expensive, retailing for $1200.00 and more due to real concerns by the law abiding about Obama's gun grabbing tendencies and desires. Dealers cannot keep them on the shelves, and most of the time, have none.

(4) Ammunition for such weapons and for common handguns is equally rare and expensive, for the same reason.

Knowing these simple facts, facts that any reporter could discover with five minutes of effort, logic would dictate that no Mexican drug baron would bother with American weapons considering their price, unavailability and the difficulty of smuggling them over the border when they could easily use their criminal contacts and buy honest-to-gosh fully automatic military weapons and explosives at a fraction of the cost, with a fraction of the bother, from a wide variety of very willing, low risk sources.

Of course, the media suffers not only from their built in far left tilt, but a complete lack of understanding of, or interest in, firearm and related issues, as well as a genetic predisposition that prevents them from ever researching anything that might contradict their inbred beliefs.

Are there some weapons in Mexico that originated, in one way or another in America? Surely. However, what applies here applies there: Criminals do not obey the law, any law. Therefore, logic also dictates (as well as innumerable studies, many by anti-gun organizations) that no gun control law, the expired "assault weapon" ban being a case in point, will have any effect on criminals and crime.

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Posted by: idoppanrtqg at April 2, 2009 11:54 PM

This post has been linked for the HOT5 Daily 4/3/2009, at The Unreligious Right

Posted by: UNRR at April 3, 2009 05:45 AM

There goes hilary again with her lies. She is really scary.

The entire obama cabinet is scary. Their backgrounds are apalling and so is his!

We are in for a very rough ride big time. Yet he still has big approval rating according to the charts.

Posted by: JosephineSouthern at April 3, 2009 06:22 AM

It is becomming apparent those of us who love liberty and freedom. Those of us who have put our lives on the line for the sake of freedom my be called upon again to defend freedom from the forces that would steal it. This time, those forces are domestic. One can only wonder which side the pentagon is on and will American soldiers fire on American civilians.

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