(Note: This report includes several links to stories published a decade or more ago on a website that no longer exists except via web crawls on the Internet Archive “Wayback Machine.” As such, those links may load slowly.)
U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Mexico issues arrest warrants in ‘Fast and Furious’ gun trafficking case,” Reuters reports. “A Mexican judge has issued seven arrest warrants related to a decade-old cross-border arms trafficking sting, including for the country’s most notorious drug lord and an ex-security minister…”
“The Mexican attorney general’s office announced the warrants Sunday, naming three of the targets, including drug kingpin Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán,” The Hill elaborates. “The other two targets named were Genaro García Luna, who served as Public Security secretary under former Mexican President Felipe Calderón, and Luis Cárdenas Palomino, a close collaborator of García Luna’s and former head of intelligence for Mexico’s now-defunct Federal Police.”
So, it was a “public/private partnership”? Conducted by higher-ups in the virulently anti-“lax U.S. gun laws” Calderón administration while El Presidente was demanding a renewed U.S. “assault weapons ban” and the usual gang of domestic useful idiots was cheering him on…? At the same time, his military guard was leaking secrets to the cartels?
I never did get an answer to my tweet. And it does raise questions into how much corrupt Mexican functionaries knew about “gunwalking” while those tasked with officially coordinating such information were being restrained from doing so by higher-ups. As if U.S. semiautos being walked across the border was the real source of supply for cartels that got military-grade weaponry from their Mexican government partners (who got them from “authorized” U.S. exports) and from shipments coming across its southern border.
The ubiquitous “botched gun sting” characterization mentioned in the lede is a good indication that the public is once more being steered toward a narrative parroted by a “mainstream press” that had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the story in the first place.
How can you have a “sting” if you allow the guns to cross the border and escape into the wild, making no attempt to track them? And how can you attempt that with the Mexican government kept in the dark? That at least is the official story and attempts to pierce the U.S. government’s veil of obfuscation have been successfully deflected so far.
Colleague Kurt Hofmann came up with an apt analogy showing the “sting” model was every bit as ridiculous and unbelievable as South Park’s “underpants gnomes” business model:
Phase 1: Allow guns to “walk,” Phase 2: ? and Phase 3: Take down the cartels.
How do you get from here to there?
Chillingly, it looks like Phase 2 was “Count on guns being recovered next to bodies at Mexican crime scenes.” And it looks like phase 3 was really “Use that to trick the public into demanding more U.S. gun laws.”
And an incontrovertible fact remains: Either ATF engineered this violation of Arms Export Control Laws into a sovereign foreign nation and either left Hillary Clinton’s State Department in the dark or it didn’t. Why has Congress, with House Oversight and Senate Judiciary running tag team investigations, and the “independent” Office of Inspector General report, never definitively resolved that? Why are a handful of motivated citizens with extremely limited resources the only ones asking, like Kent Terry, brother of slain Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, whose murder was the beginning of ATF’s unraveling?
We know part of the answer was so that ATF management could treat Gunwalker crimes as personnel policy violations. And we saw how that worked out in the case of one of the key players, with a lucrative double-dipping “sweetheart deal” (that also got him out of the country) courtesy of the Bureau’s credit card provider (which also “just happens” to financially discriminate against “companies that make military-style weapons for consumers”).
And when things started getting too hot for the DOJ, the Fifth Amendment came into play. It shows how unjustifiably optimistically wrong I was when I speculated:
“This could be huge: The monolithic front presented by the administration is crumbling. Career law enforcement personnel are in fear of being charged as criminals and are looking to protect themselves. That could mean ultimately implicating higher-ups, as opposed to falling on their swords and taking one for the team.”
That never happened (you’ll have to ask the Republicans why), so nothing to see here, folks.
Back to the present, what’s happening now may as well be labeled “lather, rinse, repeat.”
“DEA says cartels are arming themselves with military-grade weapons coming from the US,” San Antonio’s Fox 29 claims. “The Mexican government says 70% of crimes committed with guns in Mexico are linked to guns that came from the U.S. and of those, more than 40% come from Texas alone.”
They’re using the same old lies they used to prime the public for more citizen disarmament until that got interrupted by Fast and Furious being exposed. First, it’s not military-grade weaponry, and second, the percentages are being deliberately misrepresented: It’s not “crimes committed with guns in Mexico,” it’s gun information submitted by the Mexican government to ATF for tracing. The ones they didn’t submit are for obvious reasons.
With this as the backdrop, the domestic agents of a foreign entity over at the Brady Campaign are partnering with the Mexican government in its $10B lawsuit against U.S. gun manufacturers to try to do through the courts what they can’t get accomplished through legislation – destroy the firearms industry, disarm the citizens and undermine what the Founders knew as “being necessary to the security of a free State.”
It would seem the wrong people are on trial for seditious conspiracy.
And I don’t suppose controlling the border might be an option to reduce the flow of guns, or is the flow of future Democrats more important to the people who want us disarmed?
Afterword:
On Saturday, I discussed much of this with Lies of Omission producer T.L. Davis on his Texas TL in Exile podcast:
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.
