ATF Death Watch 19: Mexico Needs Guns; Why The ATF Got it Totally Backwards

Like any long-running mainstream media meme, the Gunwalker scandal has its own theme song: Oops!… I Did It Again. The MSM are selling the ATF’s malfeasance as an enormous f up, wherein the same law enforcement agency that went a little overboard at Waco did something really, really stupid. Yes, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (and really Big Fires) should have known better. Yes, someone must be held accountable for the death of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, shot by drug thugs armed with a weapon or weapons enabled by the ATF. But if you think about it, the Agency’s heart was in the right place. After all, the drug cartels are the REAL bad guys. As the South Africans say, ja nir . . .

By now it should be clear that Mexico’s drug cartels have taken over the country. They’ve murdered journalists, politicians, judges, businessmen, police, soldiers and each other, with impunity. Their control is so complete that they’ve set up roadblocks to extort blood money from anyone bold enough to believe they have the right to travel freely. The cartels have murdered so many people that they’ve resorted to dumping lifeless bodies into mass graves.

Every single day, there’s a fresh story of murder and mayhem. Today, it’s Eight Bodies Found in Mountains in Northern Mexico and Gunmen Kidnap 7 from Drug Rehab Center in Northern Mexico. Cartel-related casualties number in the tens of thousands. That’s to say nothing of the thousands of people physically and psychologically maimed by torture, or the millions of Mexican living in fear, denied their basic human rights. The Taliban have nothing on these guys.

So anything the ATF can do to stop the Mexican drug cartels from gaining access to deadly weapons is a good thing, right? Even if we have to give them weapons to stop giving them weapons, well, why not? Where do I begin? How about this: it’s too late. The Mexican drug cartels have all the guns they need, and then some.

The ATF purposely mislead Americans to believe that “90 percent of Mexican cartels’ guns come from Bob’s Gun Store.” That lie was exposed: 88 percent of guns confiscated by the Mexican authorities and successfully submitted for trace to the ATF came from America. (Not necessarily American gun dealers either, BTW). How many qualifiers can you stick in a stat to make it bark like a dog? More importantly, the total population of guns confiscated by the Mexicans was 30,000.

Now consider the fact that the Mexican police and military are thoroughly corrupt. There’s every reason to believe that these two entities have supplied the drug cartels with a majority of their box fresh military-grade weapons. Weapons that American and foreign small arms makers sold to the Mexican authorities legally. In fact, the Mexican police and military have no real reason to confiscate any weapons—other than creating a little security theater and transferring ownership from one cartel to another.

But let’s assume the confiscated guns are part of some legitimate law enforcement effort. What percentage of the cartels’ arsenal does 30,000 guns represent? Let’s be generous and call it 10 percent. That gives us an installed weapons base in the region of 300,000 firearms (not including grenades and grenade launchers). Remember: that’s a one-year total. What’s the bet the cartels have access to a million illegal guns?

The U.N. called this one: any new weapons brought into Mexico on the drug cartels’ behalf are simply new guns for old. They’re upgrading or topping-up. Which makes the ATF’s efforts to damn the “Iron River” of guns smuggled from America to Mexico—a river largely of their own creation—a pathetic joke. As Congressman Issa said at the beginning of his Gunwalker hearings, the ATF’s operations were inherently delusional. They could no more stop the drug cartels from tooling-up than a bug sprayer can eradicate cockroaches from the face of the earth.

Here’s an interesting angle: what should the ATF have done? Answer: arrested any Mexico-bound straw purchasers they came across. Other than that, nothing. Combatting Mexican drug cartels is not in their remit. It was none of their God damn business. Actually, if the ATF wanted to be really clever, they could have HELPED gun smugglers smuggle guns into Mexico. Mexican civilians need guns (and ammo) to defend themselves against the cartels’ rein of terror.

It’s hard for me to describe the full magnificence of the ATF’s hubris and institutional inanity. Suffice it to say, this is what happens when you give $1.5 billion dollars a year to a federal agency that has no real reason to live. They find one. Is it any surprise that they found the wrong one? Not to me it isn’t. But I am ready to be surprised. Because the ATF’s Gunwalker machinations have forced Congress to lift the rock on the vermin across our border. And our role in helping them thrive.

Did you know that Mexico is America’s second largest supplier of crude oil? We import over a million barrels of oil per day from our neighbor to the South. Also, a great deal of “our” manufacturing is now based in Mexico. I wonder if the U.S. could do anything to convince the Mexican government to allow their citizens their constitutional right to keep and bear arms, thus combatting Mexican drug cartels at the sharp end? I doubt it. But let’s see where this Gunwalker scandal takes us.