Never Let Go of the Narrative

Nick Miroff and William Booth have a fascinating article in the Washington Post about U.S. grenades provided to allied governments in past decades turning up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

M67 "baseball" grenades, typically stolen from military armories in Central America, are part of a growing arms race between cartels and government forces.

Miroff and Booth have done their homework identifying the source of the grenades, but then they got sloppy:

The redeployment of U.S.-made grenades by Mexican drug lords underscores the increasingly intertwined nature of the conflict, as President Felipe Calderón sends his soldiers out to confront gangs armed with a deadly combination of brand-new military-style assault rifles purchased in the United States and munitions left over from the Cold War.

As we've covered extensively in the past, only 8-percent of cartel firearms are purchased in U.S. gun shops, and the number of firearms traced to the U.S. for any reason—including stolen weapons— is still just 18-percent.

The vast majority of cartel weapons—82-percent—comes from the same black market sources as the grenades.

It's a shame that writers who did their homework to track down the various sources of cartel grenades so easily believed the fictions created by politicians such as Barack Obama and Felipe Calderon about cartel small arms, stories readily debunked by our own BATF trace data.

Neither cartel grenades nor guns come from American civilian sources.

It's too bad the authors were all too eager to continue pressing a left-wing anti-gun agenda in an otherwise informative article.