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Skydivesnake

TexasGal wrote:That entire thing is making my blood pressure soar. That the anti-gun press repeats this stuff ad nauseum without even questioning the motivation of the source is soooooo infuriating. It's been all over the news here in the DFW metoplex.
Mexico is profoundly unwilling to face it's policy of striping guns from it's honest citizens is an utter failure. Now, the political pressure is on to make our government take ours too in an equally misguided belief this will somehow make a dent in the crime there.

Yes it's infuriating - here is what I see is the process of intentional misinformation;

Real events according to FBI data and GOA report June 2009;
29,000 guns recovered on 2008-2007,
11,000 sent to the FBI,
6,000 were successfully traced,
5,114 of those were confirmed to be of US origin,
Therefore 5114 / 6000 = 85%

All well and good so far... but this morphs into;

Story communicated by various .gov and media outlets;
75,000 guns recovered in Mexico (from a different set of unsubstantiated data),
85% (percentage figure from calculation above, and now used independently of the original facts or context) come from the US,
Therefore 63,750 guns came from the US.

You then see the 63,750 number (often rounded upto 65,000) bandied about as fact, when it clearly isn't. Infact, all a politician needs to do is say '85%', 'guns', 'US' and 'Mexico' and the uninformed and easily led fill in the rest for themselves, with the help of the complicit media.

Skydivesnake

Sorry - final post on this one; here's a more readable report regarding the porous nature of the Mexico/Guatemala border (rather than from a Mexican news website through Google translator);

http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/12/d ... order.html

Cheers,

SDS

Skydivesnake

austinrealtor wrote:
EconDoc wrote:I have no doubt that most of the weapons used by the drug cartels were made in the USA. What I doubt is that the majority were purchased from dealers or bought face-to-face in the US. Here is an interesting factoid that I noticed on a National Geographic program called "Border Wars". They showed an M16 that they said was made in the US. Attached to it was a grenade launcher. The camera zoomed in on the grenade launcher and, sure enough, it said "Made in USA". Now, we all know that functional grenade launchers are classified as "Destructive Devices" by BATFE, and, thus, are tightly controlled in the US. Right next to the "Made in USA" marking was another marking that had been obscured by a big blob of white paint. Anybody want to bet that marking was either a Mexican military or police stamp? I am certain that it was. To my mind the pipeline for arms to Mexico goes like this: 1. Mexican government buys arms for their military and police from US companies. 2) Some of those arms are then stolen from the Mexican government by corrupt military and police officials and sold to the cartels. And, lawful gun owners in the US get blamed by the media. Any comments?

that's certainly one very likely scenario. the other is the drug cartels are rich and powerful enough to buy whatever arms they want (including grenades, full-auto guns etc) from arms dealers on the international black market. Why send mules to the US to buy semi-auto guns at inflated retail prices when they can buy full-auto guns for half that from the black market that also supplies genocides in African etc.

I'm sure some desperate drug gangs do get some guns from straw purchases and other means more closely linked to the US civilian gun market. But it's a small amount of the total.

Yes - agree 100%. If you are the cartel armorer and it's your task to source 10,000 rifles and a few hundred thousand rounds of ammunition, are you going to embark on the hassle and risk of attention (from ATF, LEO, Border Patrol, Customs etc) of sourcing from the US in small batches - hiring the straw purchasers, US>Mx smugglers, coordinating them and their 'fees' etc, to get a bunch of semi-auto rifles - OR - simply place a call to your local friendly Guatemalan arms supplier who will bring full-autos in over the zero-risk Southern border, and deliver them to a location of your choosing for one easy, low payment. And would you like a few hundred Korean grenades at $6 each to go with that order, Sir ?

These cartels are milti-billion dollar international organisations and operate as such - it's just the low-end gangbangers who have someone smuggle in a couple of pistolas hidden in the gas tank.

Skydivesnake

EconDoc wrote:I have no doubt that most of the weapons used by the drug cartels were made in the USA. What I doubt is that the majority were purchased from dealers or bought face-to-face in the US. Here is an interesting factoid that I noticed on a National Geographic program called "Border Wars". They showed an M16 that they said was made in the US. Attached to it was a grenade launcher. The camera zoomed in on the grenade launcher and, sure enough, it said "Made in USA". Now, we all know that functional grenade launchers are classified as "Destructive Devices" by BATFE, and, thus, are tightly controlled in the US. Right next to the "Made in USA" marking was another marking that had been obscured by a big blob of white paint. Anybody want to bet that marking was either a Mexican military or police stamp? I am certain that it was. To my mind the pipeline for arms to Mexico goes like this: 1. Mexican government buys arms for their military and police from US companies. 2) Some of those arms are then stolen from the Mexican government by corrupt military and police officials and sold to the cartels. And, lawful gun owners in the US get blamed by the media. Any comments?

That is true, but not the main source in my estimation. The majority of firearms come via South America alongside the cocaine;

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/ ... LBuZEhF61A

'...has only 125 officers for a thousand miles from the southern border [with Guatemala]...'

'...One of the most memorable images of the day was the constant flow of rafts on which to transport people and goods across the river illegally and in view of the authorities...'

'...between Mexico and Guatemala and Belize, as a wild country where drug traffickers and arms smugglers crossing the planes loaded with cocaine and land in broad daylight day, the police are ineffective or corrupt and the people, abandoned for centuries by the State, has decided to accept the protection of powerful criminal gangs...'

The AK-style rifles are cheaply produced and transported across the globe - legally or illegally. Chavez has an AK factory that supplies rifles and ammo by the container-load to Colombian FARC who supply them, along with their cocaine to the Mexican cartels.

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